Most Top News Sites Block AI Bots. Right-Wing Media Welcomes Them
Nearly 90 percent of top news outlets like The New York Times now block AI data collection bots from OpenAI and others. Leading right-wing outlets like NewsMax and Breitbart mostly permit them.
By Kate Knibbs, WIRED
As media companies haggle licensing deals with artificial intelligence powerhouses like OpenAI that are hungry for training data, they’re also throwing up a digital blockade. New data shows that over 88 percent of top-ranked news outlets in the US now block web crawlers used by artificial intelligence companies to collect training data for chatbots and other AI projects. One sector of the news business is a glaring outlier, though: Right-wing media lags far behind their liberal counterparts when it comes to bot-blocking.
