Why let them take it for free?

Oct 13, 2023

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My name is Sara Forni, AI Product Manager at Atex, and this is MyType, a newsletter dedicated to journalism, innovation and artificial intelligence.

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ChatGPT can now also surf the big world of internet. A few weeks ago, OpenAI announced that the chatbot will be able to provide users with relevant and up-to-date answers in real time. The new capability of the system is the result of a function called 'Browse with Bing'. This is a browser plug-in that allows ChatGPT to connect to the Internet via Microsoft's search engine API.

The function is currently available for the desktop version of ChatGPT and for the iOS and Android versions of the system. To try it out, you need to be a ChatGPT Plus or Enterprise subscriber. However, the company led by Sam Altman has assured users that the new feature will soon be available to everyone. In this way, OpenAI bridges the gap it had until now with Bard, Google's conversational chatbot that is able to provide answers in real time using Google Search and Perplexity AI.

Increased concern and excitement

While this news has aroused a great deal of curiosity among users, it has also increased concerns on the part of editors and editorial staff, who now see more clearly the threat of these great generative models of 'learning' and improving themselves by assimilating all published articles, past, present and future.

There are two main consequences this may have for editorial offices:

1. Aggravating ‘zero click searches’ trend

2. Nobody pays for this content

Goodbye direct traffic to the website

With the update, users will be able to ask ChatGPT questions about current events, and the replies will probably be based on articles from news organizations around the world, who will lose out on traffic if individuals can get the information, they need without ever visiting the original source. It may turn out to be a continuation of the trend in "zero click searches” in which search engine results pages provide users with the information they want without requiring them to click through to articles that may have provided the information in the first place. However, OpenAI also promised to provide “direct links to sources”.

“Search was designed to find the best of the internet”, explained Joey Levin, CEO of US media giant IAC interviewed by Semafor: “These large language models, or generative AI, are designed to steal the best of the internet.”

As Semafor report, that nightmare scenario, for Levin, would turn a Food & Wine review into a simple text recommendation of a bottle of Malbec, without attribution.

“The machine doesn’t drink any wine or swirl any wine or smell any wine”, Levin said.

Create with Dall-E 3. My suggestion: ‘Create an image of a robot-journalist drinking wine for a review’. Auto-prompt by ChatGPT: ‘Illustration of a robot with camera lenses for eyes, dressed in a journalist's attire, holding a wine glass and analyzing the wine's aroma. The setting is a classy wine bar with patrons observing the robot's review process’

Nobody pays for this content

The second problem is that large technology companies are not paying newsrooms for scraping content, which is why the news industry is starting to organise itself to stop this 'robbery'. “No one is generating any traffic from allowing it currently, so why let them take it for free with nothing in return?”, says Chris Dicker, a board member for the UK’s Independent Publishers Alliance.

If publishers take no action, their content will continue to be used as sources for Bing Chat and other chatbot. Content tagged NOCACHE “may” be included in Bing Chat answers but only URLs, snippets and titles would be displayed and used in training the model. Content tagged NOARCHIVE will not be included, linked to, or used for training purposes.

Initially, Google has created Google-Extended, a tool for publishers to be able to control access to content on their sites and decide whether they “help improve” Google Bard, its AI-driven chat tool, or not. But a few days ago, Search Engine Land has reported that Google-Extended does not stop Google’s new AI-generated answers in search results pages from using publishers’ content even if they believe they have opted out from all of its AI products.

Will the (real) solution be to block content?

As we said, the UK’s Independent Publishers Alliance and more other newsrooms all over the world are running to block crawling access for OpenAI and Google as soon as possible.

Dicker said: “Now is a crucial time to make this decision. If all sites chose to block OpenAI and/or Bard, then its knowledge would be stuck in 2021 and they would have to come to the table and negotiate with publishers for the use of their content. The fact that ChatGPT is about to make its database up to date for current events, makes it a critical time for publishers to force their hand on this.”

Since August, 47,3% of 1,149 news publishers monitored in a continual survey by open-source archiving system homepages.news have blocked out of ChatGPT’s trawls using robots.txt – the code that tells trawlers what parts of a website they are allowed to access. 45.9% of these blocked OpenAI.

However, not everyone agrees. Sajeeda Merali, chief executive of the Professional Publishers Association, told Press Gazette in August there are disadvantages to opting out.

“[If] ChatGPT is to continue to grow and become an entry point for digital information in the same way that Google search is at the moment then opt-out isn’t really a viable option” she said.

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