The Associated Press is partnering with ChatGPT creator OpenAI LP to explore the possible applications of generative artificial intelligence in the news industry.

Under the deal revealed today, AP will license a part of its enormous archive of historical news stories to OpenAI, Axios reported. Meanwhile, AP will gain access to OpenAI’s large language model technology, including ChatGPT, which has dazzled millions of people with its ability to engage in humanlike conversations and writing.

AP didn’t say exactly how it intends to integrate OpenAI’s LLM technology into its news business. However, OpenAI clearly intends to benefit from the increased access to AP’s news trove, as it will gain massive amounts of data to train and refine its AI systems.

So far, news publications have appeared somewhat wary about adopting generative AI technology because of the risks, which include a tendency to create factually incorrect content. AI has also been shown to be racist at times, and there are also concerns and challenges around differentiating between content that was written by humans and by computers.

That said, AP hasn’t completely shunned AI. As far back as last decade, it began using AI models to automate corporate earnings reports, and it has since expanded that technology to its coverage of some sporting events. It also uses automation in its news gathering and production processes, for example by translating weather alerts into different languages.

AP said it will work with OpenAI to understand responsible use cases for generative AI in its news products and services. AP said it wants to help the news industry develop standards and best practices for generative AI that other newsrooms can follow. The industry is currently looking at ways in which AI can improve its output, while ensuring that it can also protect its content from being used to train AI models, without permission or compensation.

OpenAI and others in the generative AI industry have come under pressure from the news business over their practice of scraping publicly available data and using it to train their models without asking permission from the content creators. Earlier this week, comedian Sarah Silverman and two other authors sued OpenAI for using their work without compensation to train AI models.

Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE that protecting its intellectual property rights is likely one of the main motivators for AP in this deal. “For news organizations it can be favorable to strike early deals like this with AI organizations,” he said. “Generative AI models need data and news organizations have lots of it, so by doing a deal, content creators can get compensated for the use of their work, retain attribution and maybe even receive preferential or exclusive treatment. For OpenAI, it gets legal access to a reliable and content-rich data source.”

Charles King of Pund-IT Inc. said OpenAI is taking a leaf from Adobe Inc., which has managed to avoid litigation over its generative AI models by using data it owns or licenses. The partnership is advantageous in other ways too, he said.

“AP should be a particularly valuable partner for generative AI development, given the massive archive of articles, reports and long form work it owns and manages,” he said. “AP should also benefit from the deal. In fact, it has a history of utilizing automation tools so OpenAI could help it explore and possibly expand those use cases in beneficial ways.”

AP also indicated that protecting its copyright is a key element of the partnership, not just for itself but for all news agencies.

“AP firmly supports a framework that will ensure intellectual property is protected and content creators are fairly compensated for their work,” said Kristin Heitmann, AP’s senior vice president and chief revenue officer. “News organizations must have a seat at the table to ensure this happens, so that newsrooms large and small can leverage this technology to benefit journalism.”

Other news publications have already begun testing ways in which they can use generative AI to produce content. Earlier this year, BuzzFeed said it’s using AI to create personality quizzes, while the New York Times partnered with OpenAI on a Valentine’s Day message generator.

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