ensures The Post’s parent company will be at the “cutting edge of the digital age” during a time of major upheaval across the news industry, CEO Robert Thomson said in a memo to staffers.
Plunging traffic and ad revenue has led to mass layoffs and newsroom closures, with outlets like The Messenger, Vice and Buzzfeed among those affected. The five-year deal could be worth more than $250 million in cash and credits for the use of OpenAI technology, the Wall Street Journal reported in May.Google and other AI giants have faced intense criticism for using copyrighted content to train their AI chatbots without proper credit or permission – and then using those same chatbots to compete with publishers for traffic.
More recently, Google took the controversial step of adding AI-generated summaries to search results while demoting links to other outlets – a move that represents a potential death blow to the news industry, Thomson noted that such lawsuits are risky and could take years to reach a conclusion – leaving businesses to potentially major financial losses while the court battles play out.