The collaboration aims to enhance ChatGPT's expertise and capabilities regarding current events as well as real-time information.

As part of the agreement, Axel Springer will provide summaries and extracts from its reporting to OpenAI, including stories from major publications such as Politico, Business Insider, BILD and WELT. OpenAI intends to utilize the content to improve its AI systems, as well as surface relevant Axel Springer articles to ChatGPT users who ask queries related to recent news.

The summaries that are provided to ChatGPT will contain attribution back to the original Axel Springer articles, essentially giving publicity and traffic to the publisher. Users can also ask ChatGPT questions that reference the details that are shared across each of German media conglomerate's journalism brands.

OpenAI as well as Axel Springer bring news to ChatGPT

The partnership appears to be aimed at attacking one of the primary critiques of ChatGPT -- its lack of current information about current events. Applications like xAI's brand new Grok chatbot provide more real-time information by utilizing the social media information streams. Through licensing archived and recent material from the major newsrooms, OpenAI hopes to exceed and even surpass these capabilities.

The Springer deal builds on past OpenAI partnerships that have been established with Associated Press and American Journalism Project to train AI models using journalism. As OpenAI continues to be challenged about copyright infringement when scraping content without consent and licensing agreements with large publishers ensure legal protectionbut they also raise concerns over fairness and the compensation of smaller sources.

Although the partnership offers an obvious financial benefit to Springer but questions remain about whether it's ethical for OpenAI to sign such agreements with big publishers while scraping content from independent creators, and denial of any compensation. Striking the right balance around getting training data is proving to be a thorny issue for even the most well-resourced AI companies.