With OpenAI, the leader in artificial intelligence, signing cooperation agreements with more and more media companies, American antitrust agencies have also cast attention.
On Thursday Eastern Time, Jonathan Kanter, the highest antitrust official at the US Department of Justice, stated that the department is closely monitoring transactions between AI companies such as OpenAI and content creators as they may have monopolistic suspicions.
Is OpenAI involved in media transactions or suspected of monopolization?
As artificial intelligence companies such as OpenAI are actively seeking content to train their AI systems, more and more media are choosing to collaborate with OpenAI and other companies to provide training materials and authorize them.
"We are paying close attention to all these transactions," Kant said in an interview. "Just because these companies have entered into transactions and allowed one party to exercise monopoly power does not mean that it is legally acceptable."
Kantor said that AI companies need to "provide adequate compensation for the works of creators" to prevent the collapse of other industries - just like the traditional journalism after the birth of the Internet.
Kant became the Assistant Attorney General of the Anti Monopoly Division of the US Department of Justice on November 16, 2021, after previously serving as an antitrust lawyer at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). In recent years, under Kant's leadership, the US Department of Justice has gradually increased its antitrust efforts, focusing more and more on markets with only a few or a single buyer, known as monopolistic markets.
OpenAI has signed agreements with various multimedia companies
At the end of 2022, OpenAI rose to prominence after releasing ChatGPT chatbots, becoming the most popular artificial intelligence company in the world. This startup company has received strong support from Microsoft - Microsoft has invested $13 billion in it and integrated OpenAI technology into its software products.
In the past year or so, Companies such as OpenAI, Meta Platforms Inc., and Alphabet Inc., including Google, are competing to collect a large amount of data from various sources of articles, books, and online comments to train artificial intelligence systems to better understand user questions.
This once drew criticism from numerous copyright owners. They believe that these artificial intelligence companies did not provide corresponding compensation when using their works, or the usage methods did not meet their wishes.
In order to resolve this copyright dispute, OpenAI has reached multiple agreements with news providers such as Murdoch's News Corp., the Financial Times, and American digital media company Dotdash Meredith (which owns copyrights such as People magazine).
In addition, OpenAI has also signed transaction agreements with American online forum Reddit Inc., Associated Press, Axel Springer, Europe's largest digital publishing company, and France's second largest national newspaper, Le Monde.
But there are also some publishers who hold a more resistant attitude towards OpenAI. For example, The New York Times recently sued the company for using its copyrighted materials.