Time Magazine Embraces AI with OpenAI and ElevenLabs Partnerships

The Time Magazine media company is diving into generative AI through new partnerships with OpenAI and ElevenLabs.

OpenAI partnership: Time is providing its current and archival content for OpenAI to train its models, while gaining distribution through ChatGPT serving up Time article summaries with source links.

• Time will also get access to new OpenAI tools and models to use in its journalism and business operations.
• This is the eighth publicly disclosed media partnership for OpenAI, following deals with The Atlantic, Vox Media, Meredith Dotdash, Financial Times, Axel Springer, Associated Press, and the American Journalism Project.
• Notable holdouts are the New York Times, which is suing OpenAI over alleged copyright infringement, and Condé Nast publications like Wired.

ElevenLabs partnership: Time is implementing ElevenLabs’ embeddable “Audio Native” player on its website to automatically narrate select articles using AI-generated voices.

• The companies have been testing this feature since 2023, but are now officially launching it.
• Earlier this week, ElevenLabs also released its first iOS app allowing users to have AI voices narrate any web-based text content.

Analyzing the implications: These partnerships show Time’s strong confidence in AI technology, though it remains to be seen if they will significantly boost readership compared to the company’s past tech experiments with NFTs and the metaverse.

• The AI companies stand to benefit from the additional training data and validation from an established media brand.
• In particular, the ElevenLabs audio narration provides immediate utility that would likely be costly for Time to develop on its own.
• Overall, the deals highlight the accelerating adoption of generative AI tools in the media industry.