The other day I asked ChatGPT about a political moment I’ll never forget: “What was the 47 percent story about?” Its answer:

The “47 percent story” refers to a controversial comment made by Mitt Romney, who was the Republican nominee for President of the United States in the 2012 election. In a private fundraising event that was secretly recorded and later leaked to the media, Romney stated that 47 percent of Americans are dependent on government support, believe they are victims entitled to benefits, and consequently, would vote for then-President Barack Obama.

That’s accurate as far as it goes. But there’s one glaring omission: any reference to Mother Jones, which uncovered the story that reshaped that election cycle. The summary contained no links or citations to our reporting. You’d have thought it all sprang fully formed from the AI’s, uh, head.

I asked some follow-up questions and ChatGPT spit out lots more details about the story, including lengthy quotes from the video. The whole thing took maybe 20 seconds.

By contrast, it took David Corn, our Washington bureau chief, months to get the scoop. Digging into the candidate’s background in the hedge-fund world, David tracked speeches in which Romney had bragged about investments that exported American jobs overseas. Eventually, that led him to the secret video, at which point David and a team in our newsroom spent weeks verifying the content, reporting out additional context, and working out ways to present it to the public while protecting his sources.

Just as not all communities are rolling over for data centers, not all newsrooms are sitting back and letting AI steal our content. Some of us are fighting back.

OpenAI, of course, didn’t do any reporting to create its summary. They simply hoovered up the text of the story to help train ChatGPT to talk like a human. We know this because in its early versions, OpenAI listed the sources of its data (something it has since clammed up about), and in those datasets, we found tens of thousands of our stories.

OpenAI never asked for permission to use our work, nor did they offer to pay a licensing fee. Not then, when they were........

© Mother Jones