OpenAI today said its new web crawler, called GPTBot, can now be blocked using the old robots.txt file standard or by blocking its IP address. If website owners choose to use one of these methods, OpenAI won’t extract data from your site and bake it into ChatGPT.
Meanwhile, video conferencing giant Zoom quietly changed its Terms of Service in March saying that it reserves the right to use your data to train its AI. Zoom users agree to the Terms of Service or can’t use Zoom.
What these moves have in common is that, while they sound like protective benefits for the public, in fact they shift the burden of responsibility for data collection from the data grabber to the data owner.