The media war against OpenAI is in crescendo. The Guardian newspaper has blocked data collection by GPTBot, the crawler bot created by OpenAI to train ChatGPT. The British newspaper thus imitates the same path of other leading Anglo-Saxon media, such as the New York Times, CNN, Reuters or Bloomberg, and the French media that depend on Radio France, France24 and TF1.
The header directed by Alan Rusbridger is thus facing the growing concern about the unauthorized use of content by companies that have developed bots based on artificial intelligence. According to a newspaper spokesperson, "using the newspaper's intellectual property for commercial purposes is against the terms of the concession."
"The Guardian Commercial Licensing team has many mutually beneficial business relationships with developers around the world, and looks forward to building more such relationships in the future," he said.
So-called "large language models", such as ChatGPT, rely on large amounts of data to train properly and to be able to consistently respond to user requests. They use information they collect from the internet, including news articles, so that their tools can predict words and build sentences based on simple human cues. However, most of the companies behind these tools do not disclose the presence of copyrighted content in their training data sets.
The Culture, Media and Sport Committee, a multi-party group of Members of Parliament (MPs) that oversees the administration of UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, released a report urging the executive to protect intellectual property in the use of generative AI.
In addition, they warned of the need to protect creators when their image or creations are used without consent through generative AI. "All branches of government need to better understand the impact of AI and technology in general on the creative industries and be able to consistently advocate for their interests," they commented.
British book publishers also spoke out on this issue, urging the government to protect the intellectual property rights of the creative industries. This is expected to be discussed at the upcoming AI Security Summit in the UK in November.
