NiemanLab did some serious tech journalism instead of just parroting the party line as usual.
They heard that Altman has contracts with many of the biggest news outfits including AP, Financial Times, and WSJ. The chatbot answers questions from readers and refers them to previous stories from the same source. In fact the references are made up. They look like URLs belonging to WSJ or AP, but the rest of the URL is random numbers.
Nieman asked OpenAI about it and got a standard bot-generated corporate buzzword response. The same thing happened when they asked some of the media sources.
This should be bad for Altman’s bottom line, since it’s losing business for his clients. They rationally want to keep the refs in-house. They don’t want to frustrate their subscribers.
But I’m probably wrong in my naivete. The clients DO want to frustrate and lose their subscribers. Customers are Negative Externalities, bad for Share Value. Only a perfectly abstract company based in pure software is valuable.
Polistra's Mill 