Meta’s artificial intelligence (AI) assistant, Meta AI, will integrate, in real time, content published by several news media, including CNN, Fox News and Le Monde , under an agreement announced Friday.
The latter, which comes amid concerns about the future of the press in the age of generative AI, predicts that, in its responses to current affairs questions, Meta AI will offer links to articles on the websites of partner media outlets.
Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, several press publishers have reached agreements with major players in generative AI to allow them, for a fee, to use their production, whether to develop their artificial intelligence models or to enrich the responses of chatbots.
News Corp ( Wall Street Journal and Daily Telegraph among others), Le Monde , the Washington Post or Axel Springer ( Politico , Bild and Die Welt ) have done so with OpenAI, the New York Times with Amazon, Google with Associated Press, while Mistral has partnered with Agence France-Presse.
At the end of August, the start-up Perplexity unveiled a subscription formula called “Comet Plus”, named after its AI-infused internet browser, Comet, which provides access, for five dollars a month, to the content of associated media.
These include the Washington Post , Vogue , Le Monde and Le Figaro .
Perplexity has pledged to redistribute 80% of the revenue generated by Comet Plus to news publishers, with the American group retaining the remainder.
Despite these collaborations, several legal proceedings initiated by media outlets against AI assistant operators are still ongoing, notably the one by the New York Times against OpenAI, which the newspaper accuses of using its articles without authorization and without compensation.
The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post also launched lawsuits against Perplexity in 2024.
“For years, we have observed […] the difficulty of anticipating the evolution of these digital platforms, the explosion of their use and the all-too-often erratic and non-contractual use” of content, wrote Louis Dreyfus, Chairman of the Board of Le Monde , and Jérôme Fenoglio, Director of the newspaper, in an opinion piece published on Friday.
“Faced with this situation, we considered it naive to remain passive and wait for a hypothetical legislative development,” they added to justify the partnership with Meta.
The Menlo Park (California) group also linked itself with the People group , the American national daily newspaper USA Today , as well as with publications identified as right-wing, such as The Daily Caller and the Washington Examiner .