Days after India’s leading media conglomerates – Times Group, HT Group, DB Corp and The Hindu – blocked ChatGPT web crawler’s access to their websites, more news publishers have joined the bandwagon to resist the OpenAI’s attempt to use their unlicensed content.
The fresh list includes ABP group, Dainik Jagran, Amar Ujala, The Indian Express group, Eenadu and India TV. Sources in these companies confirmed the move.
Over 70 per cent of Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA) members have already restricted access to Microsoft-backed OpenAI, publishers told e4m.
Some publishers like Network18 group and Lokmat Group are yet to take a call on the matter though.
DNPA represents India’s leading news publishers such as India Today Group, HT Group, Times Group, DB Corp, Dainik Jagran, Amar Ujala, Hindustan Times, Zee Media, ABP Network, Lokmat, NDTV, New Indian Express, Mathrubhumi, Hindu, and Network18.
exchange4media broke the news last week about how leading Indian publishers have started blocking OpenAI’s web crawler.
When asked about the development, DNPA’s Secretary General Sujata Gupta said, "Many of our members have taken action to block web crawlers and are currently in the process of updating their terms and conditions."
Global media houses like the New York Times, The Guardian, CNN and Reuters have already blocked OpenAI’s access to their online offerings. NY Times has additionally threatened to file a lawsuit against OpenAI training its Generative AI tool on copyrighted articles published by the paper.
OpenAI, which does not disclose the data that helped build the model behind ChatGPT, announced on August 8 that it will enable website operators to block its web crawler from accessing their content, although the move does not allow material to be removed from existing training datasets.
'Wish to serve the public for free, but...'
ChatGPT is based on the Large Language Model (LLM) which is trained on vast numbers of documents taken from the internet: news articles, authored essays, technical reports, blogs, social media posts among others.
Apart from MS-backed OpenAi, other tech firms like Meta and Google are also developing their own generative AI tools based on LLM.
“We wish to serve the public for free, but our content is not available for free to enterprises who content and then make money without any attribution. Publishers invest huge money to produce the content including procuring the technology and paying salaries to journalists among others to bring reports from the ground. AI platforms are simply copying our content to develop their model and then making money through subscription-free. This is unfair,” the digital head of a top TV channel said.
While chatGPT’s primary version is available for free, ChatGPT Plus, a premium version which offers faster response times and priority access to new features and improvements, is available for $20/month for the public. Its API version for business has different pricing plans.
OpenAI, which rolled out ChatGPT in November 2022, is valued at $30 billion, according to international media reports.
Another news publisher alleged, “Years ago, Google built its business model similarly. We allowed them to do so as it helped us expand our reach and scale up the content at a global level. Google gradually became a global giant but it never shared a fair share of revenue with publishers.”
It is noteworthy that DNPA dragged Google to the Competition Commission of India (CCI) two years ago alleging that the tech giant was not giving them their due share of its advertising revenue, a charge that Google has always denied. The matter is still pending at the CCI.
Publishers also seek a review of the Copyright Infringement Act that was made in 1957.
“Apart from content piracy, these bots are causing a drop in referral traffic to news websites through Google Search because people prefer advanced AI-chatbots for their queries instead of Google Search which offers limited information and some news links,” alleges a publisher.
News or other websites earn revenue if users visit their sites and click on ads displayed on their web pages.
