The future might be now, but that doesn't mean you're in it.A leaked memo from media giant Dotdash Meredith (the owner of titles including People, Food & Wine, Better Homes & Gardens, and Investopedia) has revealed that the company "America's largest digital and print publisher," according to its own PR fluff will be laying off 143 people, approximately 4percent of its workforce. This comes on the heels of a smaller layoff in November of 2024, where 53 media workers lost their jobs at the company.The layoffs wouldn't be so notable in a scarred and barren post-COVID media landscape, save for Dotdash's massive "strategic partnership" with OpenAI in the spring of 2024. The deal is set to lavish Dotdash with at least $16 million in annual revenue, or at least until the AI bubble bursts. In exchange, OpenAI gets to plug "trusted content" articles written by humans,presumably, though Meredith was involved in a hazy dalliance with an AI company prior to its acquisition by Dotdash from the media corp's 40-plus brands into its model, prioritizing answers that send users back to its content wherever possible."As part of the agreement, OpenAI will display content and links attributed to Dotdash Meredith in relevant ChatGPT responses," reads a Dotdash press release announcing the deal. "OpenAI will also collaborate with Dotdash Meredith to create new AI products and features for its readers and use historical and ongoing DDM content to enhance its model's performance.""This partnership delivers the best, most relevant content right to the heart of ChatGPT," it continued, using apreferred term among those who see journalism as an amorphous product called "content."For its trouble, Dotdash will see a vague "technological investment" into its targeted ad-platform D/Cipher, which will enable the AI platform to spam slop to "something like 30 million more URLs or somewhere in that neighborhood," according to Joey Levin, CEO of IAC Inc, the parent company overseeing Dotdash Meredith.When asked to follow up on what this means for web users and how D/Cipher will be deployed across the open web, Dotdash Chief Innovation Officer Jon Roberts said, rather disconcertingly: "Thats our special sauce. Were not ready to talk about it yet."In light of this huge round of layoffs and ChatGPT's untrustworthy performance, we must ask the question and not for the first time who does this "special sauce" serve?Certainly not the 176 media workers who are now out of the job, nor for users who are inundated with mountains of AI schlok at every turn.The answer? Stakeholders! Who doesn't love to see those guys winning?In the three fiscal quarters since announcing the partnership, IAC's licensing revenue has skyrocketed, as the OpenAI money furnace floods the media conglomerate in "If you look at Q3 of 2024... licensing revenue was up about $4.1 million year-over-year," said Christopher Halpin, who holds the mouthful title of EVP, CFO & COO of IAC Inc. "The lion's share of that would be driven by the OpenAI license." (Not coincidentally, Q3 2024 was the company's strongest financial quarter since Q3 of 2021.)In the face of a growing AI-pocalypse which workers and consumers are powerless to stop, corporations like IAC have some pretty important questions to answer. How does OpenAI recoup its costs in this scenario? What happens to your licensing revenue stream when or if the well runs dry? How many more layoffs does Dotdash plan to reward their workforce with in exchange for their "help" training OpenAI's LLMs? And who will be left holding the bag when the whole bubble bursts the media workers who've made the company what it is today, or C-Suite terminators who hoard 3-letter titles like ChatGPT hoards personal data?Share This Article