Why in the News?

Recently, a group of news media organisations, including The New York Times, Reuters and CNN blocked the OpenAI’s ability to access their content.

• This comes on the background that The New York Times is planning on suing the artificial intelligence (AI) research company over copyright violations.

What is OpenAI?

1. OpenAI is the company that created ‘ChatGPT’, an AI conversational chatbot. 
2. ChatGPT can provide users with accurate answers, stories and essays on users’ questions just about anything.
3. The bot can even help programmers write software code. 
4. The recent advancements in AI have enriched the ChatGPT as a highly useful advancement which has propelled OpenAI into becoming a $30 billion company.

The face-off between news outlets and OpenAI?

1. ChatGPT are based on ‘large language models’ (LLMs) which require enormous amounts of information to train their systems.
2. Though Tech companies that work on LLMs like Google, Meta or Open AI are secretive about the kind of training data that is used to train AI systems, it is evident that they use online content found across the Internet.
3. Such online contents include social media posts, news articles, Wikipedia, e-books, etc., which forms a significant part of the dataset used to train ChatGPT and other similar products. 
4. Software called ‘crawlers’ are used by tech companies to scan web pages, hoover up content and put it together in a dataset, used to train the LLMs.
   • A web crawler called GPT bot, used by OpenAI to scrape data was blocked by the news outlets like The New York Times and others.
   • The news outlets have specified that OpenAI cannot published their material and journalism to train their chat bots.

Why are media companies upset?

1. ChatGPT is seen as a potential competitor
2. No monetary or other benefits to the news outlets
   1. Search engines like Google or Bing use web crawlers to index websites and to give relevant results when users search for topics.
   2. But this is a mutually beneficial relationship because google takes only a snippet of a news article for aiding the search results, while it also helps significant amount of user traffic to news websites.
   3. On the other hand, OpenAI collects publicly available data and uses it for the company’s own purposes and provides no benefit, monetary or otherwise.
3. Copyright infringement issues- Crawlers like GPTBot do not ask for permission, license, or pay to use any data or information they extract.

Way forward:

1. Microsoft already offers businesses access to ChatGPT via its Azure OpenAI Service.
2. OpenAI has been paying for use of some data:
   • OpenAI signed a licensing arrangement with The Associated Press, in a deal that has enabled the company to use the news agency’s archival content as a training dataset.