U.K. Media Groups, Including Sky News and The Guardian, Partner With “Ethical AI” Company

U.K. media firms Sky News, the Guardian Media Group, the Financial Times, and dmg media, publisher of the Daily Mail, have signed a strategic partnership with L.A.-based tech company ProRata.ai, an “ethical AI” firm whose technology is designed to compensate creators and publishers for the use of their work by generative Artificial Intelligence systems.

ProRata signed similar partnerships with The Atlantic, Fortune, Time, Universal Music Group (UMG) and German publishing giant Axel Springer, earlier this year, as well as with several authors.

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“Our AI technology is the only one that credits and compensates creators while providing consumers with highly accurate search results,” said company CEO Bill Gross. “Stealing and scraping content is not a sustainable path forward.”

The company’s tech is designed to be combined with generative AI platforms like ChatGTP or Sora to allow the platforms to identify the use of copyright-protected content and compensate rights holders on a pre-use basis. The company argues the technology will also help prevent un-attributed, unreliable content from compromising AI results.

“Global audiences trust Sky News to give them the full story, first. ProRata’s solution helps advance that high-quality, impartial journalism across AI platforms and publishers,” said David Rhodes, Executive Chairman, Sky News, in a statement. “With all our partners today we’re securing our company’s massive investment in fair and accurate news reporting – now, and well into the future.”

Added Anna Bateson, CEO of the Guardian Media Group: “The trusted, quality journalism for which The Guardian is world-renowned must be fairly credited and valued when used by AI platforms. ProRata respects and promotes these fundamental principles, and we are pleased to be partnering with them.”

ProRata is one of several companies that see a business opportunity in finding tech solutions to the scrape-and-steal model of most generative AI systems, which are trained on copyright-protected material but do not compensate the original creators. UMG has signed deals with AI music company Klay Vision and sound wellness group Endel to create commercial, and ethical, AI models that compensate artists for their use of their work. Stock images giant Getty Images recently did a deal with AI giant Nvidia to create AI text-to-image and text-to-video services with a generative model trained on Getty’s copyright-protected library of stock images.

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