Publishers are selling papers to train AIs — and making millions of dollars

"Since the explosion in popularity of generative artificial intelligence (AI), several scholarly publishers have forged agreements with technology companies looking to use content to train the large language models (LLMs) that underlie their AI tools. A new tracker aims to catalogue what deals are being made — and by whom.

“We were seeing announcements of these deals, and we got to thinking that this is starting to become a pattern,” says Roger Schonfeld, a co-creator of the tracker and vice-president of libraries, scholarly communication and museums at Ithaka S+R, a higher-education consulting firm in New York City. “We wanted to shine some light on not just the individual deals, but also what the overall pattern was starting to look like — and provide a source for the community.”..."