Media companies grapple with AI both inside and outside newsrooms

cointelegraph.com:

Many leading media companies have taken a stance against allowing artificial intelligence (AI), like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, into the newsrooms, and have withheld permission for AI to scan their content on the web. 

It has been reported that multiple mainstream media companies including CNN, the New York Times and Reuters have coded their platforms to stop OpenAI’s web crawler GPTBot from having access to their content.

The web crawler was released on Aug. 8 to potentially improve future ChatGPT models by indexing content from websites across the web.

Additionally, a CNN report claimed other news and media giants have also done the same, including Disney, Bloomberg, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Axios, Insider, ABC News and ESPN among others. Major publishing houses like Condé Nast and Vox Media have also taken measures against AI.

Danielle Coffey, the president and chief executive of the News Media Alliance, told a CNN reporter that with AI in the picture: 

Already AI developers have been faced with lawsuits pertaining to copyright infringement from material used to train models. On July 12, Google was hit with a lawsuit for its then-new AI data-scraping privacy policy. 

Prior to that, author Sarah Silverman and two others sued Meta and OpenAI for using her copyrighted work to train their systems without the proper consent.

Back in April, the CEO of News Corp Australia was ahead of the game when he argued that ChatGPT and similar AI systems must pay for the news consumed.

It’s not just media companies that have been proactive in banning the usage of AI chatbots in the workplace or banning the systems from accessing content. 

In May tech-giants Samsung and Apple both banned the internal usage of AI chatbots like ChatGPT, over