SAN FRANCISCO, March 14, 2024 (BSS/AFP) - OpenAI on Wednesday announced partnerships with French daily Le Monde and Spanish conglomerate Prisa Media, saying it intends to develop news-related uses of its ChatGPT artificial intelligence tool.

OpenAI will be able to use content from Le Monde and Prisa Media publications including El Pais, Cinco Dias, and El Huffpost to train the models powering its artificial intelligence, the San Francisco-based company said in an online post.

"In partnership with Le Monde and Prisa Media, our goal is to enable ChatGPT users around the world to connect with the news in new ways that are interactive and insightful," OpenAI chief operating officer Brad Lightcap said in the post.

In the coming months, ChatGPT users will be able to get summaries of news content from the publishers along with links to original articles, according to OpenAI.

"This partnership with OpenAI allows us to expand our reach and uphold our commitment to providing accurate, verified, balanced news stories at scale," Le Monde chief executive Louis Dreyfus said in the post.

He described Le Monde as France's leading news outlet with 600,000 subscribers and more than 2 million daily users.

"Our partnership with OpenAI is a strategic move to ensure the dissemination of reliable information to AI users, safeguarding our journalistic integrity and revenue streams in the process," Dreyfus said.

Financial details of the partnerships were not disclosed.

Prisa Media chief executive Carlos Nunez called the OpenAI alliance a "step toward the future of news" where technology and human expertise merge to serve readers.

OpenAI had previously announced partnerships last year with The Associated Press and Axel Springer.

The European Parliament gave final approval on Wednesday to the world's most far-reaching rules to govern artificial intelligence, including powerful systems like OpenAI's ChatGPT.

The AI Act focuses on higher-risk uses of the technology by the private and public sector, with tougher obligations for providers, stricter transparency rules for the most powerful models like ChatGPT, and outright ban on tools considered too dangerous.

Brussels has been sprinting to pass the new rules since OpenAI's Microsoft-backed ChatGPT arrived on the scene in late 2022, unleashing a global AI race.

There was a burst of excitement for generative AI as ChatGPT wowed the world with its human-like capabilities -- from digesting complex text to producing poems within seconds or passing medical exams.

But with the excitement came a swift realisation of the threats -- not least that AI-generated audio and video deepfakes would turbocharge disinformation campaigns.