New York Times blocks ChatGPT feature, says website – 8/24/2023 – Tech

The website of the newspaper The New York Times blocked access to an OpenAI resource, creator of ChatGPT, so that the content of the publication was used by artificial intelligence.

The resource is called a web crawler and consists of scanning the site, saving the contents in a database that serves as a search service and also training versions of artificial intelligence so that it can obtain answers to questions asked by users.

According to information from the website The Verge, a file made available by The New York Times called robots.txt indicates that the publication blocked GPPTot, which is the web crawler created by OpenAI in early August.

The Verge website indicates that the block would have been made on August 17. The New York Times and OpenAI were contacted but did not respond to the site.

The blocking would have occurred a day after US public radio, NPR, reported that The New Times was studying ways to protect its content on networks and was considering suing OpenAI for copyright.

The web crawling process is done by artificial intelligence companies without permission and there is no specific legislation in the United States.

The newspaper has also announced that it will not participate in a media group that sought an agreement with large technology companies to defend the interests of journalism.