OpenAI's new AI-powered search engine, SearchGPT, is already being blocked by several major news organizations on its release amid growing reports of data scraping and unauthorized use of licensed content.
First reported by Business Insider, The New York Times and 13 other news agencies declared plans to block OpenAI's OAI-SearchBot to prevent the chatbot from displaying relevant results from their platforms.
Other news outlets that have since blocked the web crawler include Wired, The New Yorker, Vogue, and Vanity Fair, many of which have previously opposed generative AI's current application in the news industry.
In response, Originality.ai, the developer of the web crawler, claimed that the tool should be instead be welcomed as it is still "traffic that publishers want and need."
Why are News Publishers Hesitant Against AI Web Crawlers?
The root cause of many news outlets' hesitancy against AI web crawlers stems from reports of AI companies scraping licensed and paywalled content to train their models in secret, essentially committing copyright infringement.
Just last week, several AI giants like Apple, NVIDIA, and Anthropic were allegedly using over 173,000 YouTube videos and transcripts to train their AI text generators, violating the platform's policies against
The New York Times, in particular, is even currently engaged in a legal battle against OpenAI and Microsoft for allegedly using its licensed content to train their models without authorization or compensation.
It did not help that the release of OpenAI's search engine came amid many publishers' battle against Google for trying to evade California's new laws to provide news outlets compensation for displaying their articles on its search engine.
Related Article : Apple, NVIDIA, Anthropic Accused of Using YouTube Transcripts for AI Training Without Permission
OpenAI to Ramp Up Search Engine Development
Despite growing opposition to the company's AI development practices, OpenAI already signaled plans to increase the speed of its AI-powered search engine in hopes of competing against Google Search.
Other AI firms like Anthropic have also announced intentions to create their own search tool, while established tech giants such as Microsoft intend to employ the technology to improve their existing search engines to catch up with Google.
