News organizations are in a cold war with OpenAI.
While a shot has yet to be fired, some of the nation’s largest newsrooms are actively taking defensive measures to safeguard their content from ChatGPT, the groundbreaking artificial intelligence chatbot that is seen as a potential aggressor to an already struggling news industry.
A multitude of leading newsrooms have recently injected code into their websites that blocks OpenAI’s web crawler, GPTBot, from scanning their platforms for content. The Guardian’s Ariel Bogle reported last week that CNN, The New York Times and Reuters had blocked GPTBot. But a Reliable Sources review has found several additional news and media giants have also quietly taken this step, including Disney, Bloomberg, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Axios, Insider, ABC News, ESPN and the Gothamist, among others. Publishers such as Condé Nast, Hearst and Vox Media, which all house several prominent publications, have also taken the defensive measure.
