Time magazine has struck a strategic partnership with Sam Altman’s OpenAI that will see its current and historical content land on ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence products.
The multi-year licensing agreement will see OpenAI gain access to Time’s archives over 101 years to bolster its generative AI products and display, and which will include a citation and link back to the original source on Time.com.
Time, which was founded in March 1923, has digitized a vast trove of its history via its Time Vault section, including covers and original scans of individual issues. The newsweekly, which dropped its paywall last year in a bid to attract more advertising revenue vs. digital subscription revenue, still has a print subscriber base of more than 1.1 million, per the Alliance of Audited Media.
In January, the magazine’s edit union said that 15 percent of its members were subject to layoffs in a round of cuts.
“Throughout our 101-year history, Time has embraced innovation to ensure that the delivery of our trusted journalism evolves alongside technology. This partnership with OpenAI advances our mission to expand access to trusted information globally as we continue to embrace innovative new ways of bringing Time’s journalism to audiences globally,” Time COO Mark Howard said in a statement.
The Time deal follows similar partnerships OpenAI has signed with The Atlantic, News Corp., The Daily Telegraph and The Financial Times. Time has already introduced a host of AI features on Time.com, including Deep Dive, a new generative AI feature offering content recommendations to readers and AI-generated audio versions of articles.
“We’re partnering with Time to make it easier for people to access news content through our AI tools, and to support reputable journalism by providing proper attribution to original sources,” Brad Lightcap, COO of OpenAI, said in his own statement.