TORONTO, Oct 26 — Meta Platforms said yesterday its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot will use Reuters content to answer user questions in real time about news and current events, the latest AI tie-up between a big technology company and a news publisher.
Neither Meta nor Reuters parent Thomson Reuters disclosed the financial details of the partnership. The arrangement would be its first news deal in years. It comes at a time when the Facebook parent has been reducing news content on its services after criticism from regulators and publishers over misinformation and disagreement about revenue-sharing.
Meta AI, the company’s chatbot, is available across its services including Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram. The social media giant did not disclose whether it plans to use Reuters content to train its large-language model.
“We can confirm that Reuters has partnered with tech providers to licence our trusted, fact-based news content to power their AI platforms. The terms of these deals remain confidential,” a Reuters spokesman said in a statement.
Reuters will be compensated for access to its journalism under a multi-year deal, according to a report yesterday from Axios, which first published the news.
Through its partnership with Reuters, “Meta AI can respond to news-related questions with summaries and links to Reuters content”, a Meta spokesman said in an emailed statement.
Other companies including ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Jeff Bezos-backed startup Perplexity have struck similar AI partnerships with news organisations.
Reuters already has a fact-checking partnership with Meta, which began in 2020.
— Reuters
