The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on July 30 (local time) that Amazon, the world's largest e-commerce company, has signed a contract to pay an annual fee of $20 million to $25 million (approximately 27.8 billion to 34.7 billion won) to use articles from the daily newspaper The New York Times (NYT) for artificial intelligence (AI) training.
The amount paid is nearly 1% of NYT's revenue from the previous year, and sources stated that Amazon will pay this amount in cash.
Previously, in May, the two companies announced a content licensing agreement for the use of NYT articles, as well as content from NYT Cooking, a recipe and cooking site, and The Athletic, a sports media outlet. At that time, the value of the contract was not disclosed.
Under this new agreement, Amazon can train its AI models using NYT content, and provide summaries and excerpts of NYT articles through Amazon products and services, such as the AI voice assistant Alexa.
With the rising popularity of search using AI chatbots, traditional search traffic and advertising revenue for news websites are declining. Technology companies are using news articles to train AI models and provide answers to users.
OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, signed a contract last year with News Corp, the parent company of WSJ, to pay over $250 million over five years. OpenAI also signed content licensing agreements with Business Insider and Politico.
NYT is currently suing OpenAI and Microsoft (MS) for copyright infringement. News Corp subsidiaries have also filed lawsuits against Perplexity AI.
WSJ commented on the agreement, saying, "As the way consumers search for information online undergoes a seismic shift, this deal provides a window into how publishers and AI companies are valuing news content."
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