Multiple media outlets block OpenAI tool used to scrape web content

The New York Times, CNN, Australia's ABC, and news agencies Reuters and Bloomberg have all taken steps to block GPTBot, a web scraping tool that was launched on August 8. French media groups France 24, RFI, Mediapart, Radio France and TF1 have all taken similar steps. Radio France President Sibyle Veil said the agency would not allow unauthorized "stealing" of information.

According to tracking network Originality.ai., nearly 10% of the world's top 1,000 websites blocked GPTBot just two weeks after the tool was deployed, including Amazon.com, Wikihow.com, Quora.com, and Shutterstock. Tracking network Originality.ai. believes the list of sites blocking GPTBot will continue to grow, with a growth rate of 5% per week.

On its official website, OpenAI says that allowing GPTBot to access websites will help make AI models more accurate, improving the overall performance and safety of these models. However, OpenAI also provides instructions for blocking the tool if website owners do not want GPTBot to access them.

AI tools like ChatGPT, DALL-E 2 (image generation), Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney have become increasingly popular since 2022 thanks to their ability to generate content based on provided text inputs. However, the companies behind these tools like OpenAI and Stability AI have been sued by authors and artists regarding copyright issues.