The New York Times changed its Terms and Services to protect contents from A.I. model training

In a recent update of its Terms of Service on August 3, The New York Times (The NYT) states its prohibition on third-party usage of A.I. products to scrape content data from its website for A.I. model training.

The content data, referred to in the Terms of Service that’s intended for personal and non-commercial use only, includes but is not limited to text, photographs, images, illustrations, designs, audio clips, video clips, “look and feel,” metadata, data, or compilations.

The NYT further specified that the non-commercial use of its content doesn’t include “the use of content without prior written consent from The New York Times Company in connection with: (1) the development of any software program, including, but not limited to, training a machine learning or artificial intelligence (A.I.) system; or (2) providing archived or cached data sets containing Content to another person or entity.”

The update came after The NYT’s recent $US100M deal with Google, in which a three-year consent is given to the latter to feature The NYT’s content across the tech giant’s platforms, barring A.I. model training for Google’s generative A.I. product, Bard. 

Last week, several media organizations including Agence France-Presse, Getty Images, The Associated Press, and more co-signed an open letter to call for copyright protection and transparency in the use of data for A.I. model training.

Read also: “Google and Universal Music Group navigate copyrights in the era of A.I. deepfake songs”

On the other hand, another news outlet Associated Press has been in collaboration with OpenAI since last month to allow the latter to use its archives of news stories dating back to 1985.