The question is now personally pressing, as the FT last week reached a deal with OpenAI to train large language models on our content. Like many news organisations, the FT will now receive payment for its intellectual property and also get attribution when the content is surfaced.
On the one hand, you can argue that it is better to be paid than not for something that Big Tech is already doing for free, which is hoovering up journalism online to train LLMs. (FT journalists have not been privy to how much our company is being paid, or any of the financial details of the contract with OpenAI, so I can’t say whether it’s a good deal or not.)
On the other hand, I worry that we are about to see a repeat of what happened in the mid- to late-1990s, when media companies bought into Silicon Valley’s line that “information wants to be free” and didn’t take a hard line on protecting the copyright and value of their content.