OpenAI: Media organisations blocking access to ChatGPT

*Several leading media organisations have blocked access to ChatGPT, an Artificial Intelligence tool, in a bid to safeguard their content and begin to monetise access to their archival information in cyberspace

Gbenga Kayode | ConsumerConnect

In a bid to safeguard their content and begin monetising access to information, media organisations are blocking access to ChatGPT, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool.

ConsumerConnect learnt the media owners are taking the measure in order to protect their content and make money from access to their archival information.

Major media organisations are putting up “do not enter” signs for ChatGPT, report said.

By blocking OpenAI’s Web crawling bot, several media sites could be pressuring OpenAI to pay for access, report noted.

A series of news organisations, including the New York Times, CNN, Reuters and the Chicago Tribune, have all blocked the ability for ChatGPT to access their content, the Guardian UK reported last Thursday.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Australian Community Media, which owns 100 local publications, have also sealed off their Web sites, according to report.

It was gathered that OpenAI has a little weasel scurrying around the Internet collecting up-to-date information to train its large language model, ChatGPT. But it has run into a few locked doors recently.

The weasel, report noted, is actually a Web-crawling software called GPTBot, which OpenAI launched earlier August 2023.

OpenAI says on its Web site, that “allowing GPTBot to access your site can help AI models become more accurate and improve their general capabilities and safety.”

When ChatGPT launched, it had only been trained on information up until September 2021, according to report.

Stuck in the year Joe Biden became President and the United States  (US) Military exited Afghanistan, ChatGPT had to learn new things to remain relevant in the heated Artificial Intelligence race.

OpenAI has been working to address this issue, from temporarily launching a Browse with Bing feature to setting its GPTBot free to scour the Internet.

How media organisations block access to archival information

However, “do not enter” signs from major media organisations—which often have the most recent and relevant news—could present a problem for the chatbot.

The terms of service for the Times, Reuters, and the Tribune all explicitly state users may not scrape their data.

The Times’ terms specifically, say its content cannot be used to train AI programmes.

It is also emphasised that publishers are in the business of selling information, whether through providing subscriptions or showing advertisements.

Either way, they need people to visit their Web sites to make money. Freely providing their site’s content to chatbots—which might negate the need to visit publishers’ Web sites—could hurt their revenue, report said.

Rejigging media business models

Meanwhile, news outlets reportedly have already been struggling to revise their business models after the rise of social media drove advertising Dollars away from traditional media.

The knife is in publishers’ backs, and they’re trying to keep AI from twisting it.

Implication for OpenAI

By blocking GPTBot, these media organisations could be pressuring OpenAI to pay for access to their archival information. OpenAI, in July this year, was said to have struck a deal with the Associated Press to license its news stories for AI training purposes.

However, it is yet unclear how much OpenAI paid, but it’s something others might be interested in. Google, which is also scraping publishers’ sites to train its large language model, could make similar deals with news publishers that have locked it out, report added.

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