The collaboration aims to enhance ChatGPT's understanding and capabilities in relation to the latest events and information in real-time.

Under the deal, Axel Springer will provide summaries and excerpts of its reports to OpenAI with the most popular titles such as Politico, Business Insider, BILD and WELT. OpenAI intends to utilize this content to educate its AI systems, as well as surface useful Axel Springer articles to ChatGPT users who ask queries related to recent news.

The summaries provided to ChatGPT will include attribution to the complete Axel Springer articles, essentially giving publicity and traffic to the publisher. Users will also be able to ask ChatGPT questions that refer to the data that is shared by each of German media conglomerate's journalism brands.

OpenAI as well as Axel Springer bring news to ChatGPT

The collaboration appears aimed at addressing one of the main complaints about ChatGPT -- its lack of current information about the latest events. The new xAI services like the Grok chatbot offer more immediate intelligence through the use of the social media information streams. Through licensing archived and recent material from the major newsrooms, OpenAI hopes to surpass and match the capabilities of these platforms.

The Springer deal builds on past OpenAI partnership agreements with the Associated Press and American Journalism Project to train AI models using journalism. As OpenAI continues to be challenged around copyright infringement for scraping content without consent, licensing agreements with major publishers provide legal coverage -however, they also face criticism over fairness and the compensation of smaller sources.

While the partnership does provide an obvious financial benefit to Springer but questions remain about the ethicality of OpenAI to make such agreements with large publishers while stealing content from creators independent of the company and not offering any compensation. The right balance to strike around getting training data is proving to be a daunting task even for the most resource-rich AI companies.