Despite Meta ending its agreement to pay Australian publishers for premium content, News Corp are striking alternative deals including one with Open AI in a move that will see the publishers’ content used widely in AI searches.

In May, News Corp signed a global multi-year deal with OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, to allow the ChatGPT creator to use current and archived content produced by News Corp-owned outlets including those from Oz  such as The Australian, news.com.au and The Advertiser as well as News Corp’s overseas publications.

News Corp’s global CEO, Robert Thomson, has now sent a memo to staffers saying that the deal allows the company to be at the “cutting edge of the digital age”.

The deal marks an “important moment to recalibrate the world of search” long dominated by Google and puts News Corp in a position to benefit from the rise of AI rather than “dancing with digital demise,” The New York Post reported Thomson as having said.

“Provenance deserves prominence. Having a role in fashioning the future is definitely preferable to being a prisoner of the past. [Generative] AI is a threat, a real threat to journalism. Its ability to mimic and manipulate is endless. We are at a particularly early stage of its evolution, and it is an exponentially expedited evolution.”

The pivot to generative AI comes at a time when the loss of revenue from the ending of deals with social media giants in Oz is already hitting jobs in the country.

Last month, Nine Entertainment announced plans to cut 200 jobs blaming the cuts on a weak advertising market and the non-renewal of a news content deal with Meta.

The five-year deal that News Corp has signed with OpenAI could be worth more than A$372.3 million in cash and credits, the Wall Street Journal reported in May. How much of that money could flow into Australia to support the Michael Miller-led operation in the country is not clear.

The decision to strike a deal directly with OpenAI, News Corp believes, allows it to break the dominance of Google over the control of dissemination of information. Big Tech’s control over the flow of information has “undermined the viability of creation and actually led to the proliferation of tawdry, third-rate clickbait,” Thomson said.

“Our problem is already two-fold: pirate sites – or better, parasites – are already repurposing our content, and there is a mass synthesising of our work without attribution and with serious consequences,” he added. “From an IP perspective, it is synthesising spelled s-i-n, and scurrilous snippets are the unkindest cut.”

Thomson didn’t hold back in his criticism of Google. “We know two things: the importance of Google and, secondly, how inequitable, how unfair and how blatantly biased Google search can be,” Thomson said. “Our scoops are usurped by content counterfeiters whose rip-off rewrites are then given higher placements. And then there are the political prejudices that are built into the search parameters.”

He added that News Corp had put in place measures to protect its content while striking the deal with OpenAI. News Corp’s legal team sought assurances “around providing guardrails to protect our content, to provide clear sources links and to prevent the pillage that is already commonplace,” Thomson added.

Thompson warned against the practices of tech and AI companies using its content while being unauthorised to do so and said that while it prefers to “woo rather than sue” it wouldn’t shy away from doing the latter if it had to.