Several French media block OpenAI’s GPTBot over data collection concerns

 

Following steps by many English-language media, a series of French media groups including Radio France and France24 have decided to block a feature by OpenAI’s GPTBot from collecting their content online.

Artificial intelligence (AI) research and deployment company OpenAI is best known as the creator of ChatGPT, the generative AI tool that made a splash following its launch in November 2022, gathering over 100 million users in its first two months of public release.

GPTBot is the Microsoft-backed company’s web crawler, which scrapes publicly accessible data online to feed into efforts to improve ChatGPT’s accuracy – which may include copyrighted material. The chatbot uses a deep-learning language model for language processing and text generation.

A blog post by OpenAI says that “allowing GPTBot to access your site can help AI models become more accurate and improve their general capabilities and safety”. On 8 August, the company announced that the tool will automatically collect data from the entire internet, to train its GPT-4 and GPT-5 models. (...)