By Charlotte Tobitt, PressGazette, Sept. 4, 2023
In August, ChatGPT owner OpenAI gave website publishers the ability for the first time to opt out of their content being used to train AI tools. Some jumped at the chance to block the tech, but others are wary of creating a barrier that could halt any chance of them being paid for the value their content creates for companies like OpenAI.
At the start of September The Guardian became one of the first major publishers to publicly announce it has blocked ChatGPT from trawling its content.
A spokesperson for Guardian News and Media said: “The scraping of intellectual property from the Guardian’s website for commercial purposes is, and has always been, contrary to our terms of service. The Guardian’s commercial licensing team has many mutually beneficial commercial relationships with developers around the world, and looks forward to building further such relationships in the future.”
Guardian reporter Rob Davies said he was “pleased about this, given that ChatGPT made up a fake article by me and put my byline on it. Always hungry for bylines but there are limits.”
ChatGPT has been found to have referenced articles supposedly by The Guardian, with bylines from named journalists, in response to prompts made by members of the public. The errors were discovered after those researchers and students got in touch with the publisher which, after trawling the archives, found the stories never existed.
A number of other websites and publishers that have chosen to block OpenAI from using their content have been revealed by Originality.AI, an AI detector for publishers. They include: The New York Times and sister title The Athletic, CNN, Bloomberg, Insider, The Verge, PC Mag, Vulture, Mashable, Times of India, New York Magazine, The Atlantic, Bustle, Vox, Lonely Planet, Hello!, Axios, France 24, and the New York Daily News.
Here we have created a round-up of the latest deals, legal threats, guidelines, and uses of generative AI in journalism.
Recent Comments