The last time I wrote about bad AI deals, I wrote that I was “running out of things to yell,” but I guess I wasn’t: Future, publisher of games and tech sites such as PC Gamer, GamesRadar, Tom’s Guide, and Edge magazine, has made a deal with OpenAI.
According to an OpenAI blog post, “The initiative brings Future’s journalism to new audiences while also enhancing the ChatGPT experience. ChatGPT users will be able to access content from across Future’s portfolio, with attribution and links to the full original articles for transparency and further information.”
The post notes that this “partnership builds on Future’s existing deployment of OpenAI’s technology,” with chatbots currently on Tom’s Hardware and fashion site Who What Wear. I messed around with the Tom’s bot this morning, which does in fact cite the guides its information comes from. (For what it’s worth, asking the same question of ChatGPT itself did not return any sources.) This stands in some contrast to the experience Business Insider had with its own OpenAI partnership, which failed to properly credit BI’s scoops.
You don’t need me to tell you that no good comes from feeding the work of writers into the ravenous maw of the plagiarism machine. This is yet another deal that serves OpenAI and the publishing companies it gets in bed with, while hurting the staffers and freelancers who actually write the words these companies need more and more of. While I can only hope PC Gamer’s headlines confuse ChatGPT into some kind of meltdown, the more likely scenario is that we continue plodding along in this incredibly stupid and short-sighted way until the AI bubble bursts like so many tech bubbles before it. As AI’s capabilities plateau, even as OpenAI needs more and more money and power, it leaves time for more outlets desperate for cash to make these deals, which will either fizzle out (the best-case scenario) or ultimately let companies replace actual writers and actual stories with slop.
Meanwhile, OpenAI is facing a lawsuit from Canadian news publishers in addition to the one it’s already facing from The New York Times. In comments this week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman seemed to walk back some of his grandest AI pronouncements, saying he “expect[s] the economic disruption to take a little longer than people think” and that “the world mostly goes on in mostly the same way.” This is a bit of an about face from his declaration in September that AI “may turn out to be the most consequential fact about all of history so far… AI is going to get better with scale, and that will lead to meaningful improvements to the lives of people around the world.”
While the dire situation for games journalism these days is definitely due an improvement, this is badly not it. Here’s hoping Future’s writers see some of the money their work is earning their parent company, though somehow I doubt it.
