The Sam Altman-run OpenAI, has decided to fund a new journalism ethics initiative at New York University ‘s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute with a $395,000 grant. The announcements is a part of a broader effort by OpenAI to be associated with journalism on which the company replies on to train its infamous GPT-like AI models.

The initiative will be led by Stephen Adler, former EIC of Reuters who stated, “The initiative will provide workshops and discussions on existing and emerging journalism ethics issues.” 

In terms of collecting clean data OpenAI seems to be a step ahead of its competitors like Google, one can decipher from its recent partnerships with organisations like Associated Press (AP), one of the biggest US news agencies, and the $5 million deal with American Journalism Project.

The partnership with AP is said to explore ways to develop AI to support local news and in the process OpenAI will indirectly tie up with 41 news agencies that AJP supports. The funding will also support the creation of a new product studio within AJP that will support local news outlets as they experiment with OpenAI’s technology, stated Sarabeth Berman, CEO of AJP.

Even though the company has been ‘trying’ to tackle the complexity of ethical journalism amid the generative AI revolution, OpenAI has been extremely cagey about where the company got the data it used to train its latest GPT model. While the big tech companies have almost never taken data privacy of the users seriously, initiative supporting ethical journalism by one of the technology leaders is rare.

Interestingly, the New York Times has recently reported about Google’s presentation of Genesis, a project aiming to responsibly generate news copy from factual information. Executives from media outlets like The Times, The Washington Post, and News Corp were a part of this demonstration. Impressions varied, as some “said it seemed to take for granted the effort that went into producing accurate and artful news stories,” while others likened the technology to a personal assistant.

Interestingly, Google discreetly updated its privacy policy, revealing its practice of mining public web data to enhance AI services like Bard and Cloud. With OpenAI’s recent contributions and advancements, the landscape appears promising. However, saying “Don’t believe everything you read on the internet” holds more weight due to the duality of these tech developments. 

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