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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.
Data collected in mid-January on 44 top news sites by Ontario-based AI detection startup Originality AI shows that almost all of them block AI web crawlers, including newspapers like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian, general-interest magazines like The Atlantic, and special-interest sites like Bleacher Report. OpenAI’s GPTBot is the most widely-blocked crawler. But none of the top right-wing news outlets surveyed, including Fox News, the Daily Caller, and Breitbart, block any of the most prominent AI web scrapers, which also include Google’s AI data collection bot. Pundit Bari Weiss’ new website The Free Press also does not block AI scraping bots.
Most of the right-wing sites didn’t respond to requests for comment on their AI crawler strategy, but researchers contacted by WIRED had a few different guesses to explain the discrepancy. The most intriguing: Could this be a strategy to combat perceived political bias? “AI models reflect the biases of their training data,” says Originality AI founder and CEO Jon Gillham. “If the entire left-leaning side is blocking, you could say, come on over here and eat up all of our right-leaning content.”
Originality tallied which sites block GPTbot and other AI scrapers by surveying the robots.txt files that websites use to inform automated web crawlers which pages they are welcome to visit or barred from. The startup used Internet Archive data to establish when each website started blocking AI crawlers; many did so soon after OpenAI announced its crawler would respect robots.txt flags in August 2023. Originality’s initial analysis focused on the top news sites in the US, according to estimated web traffic. Only one of those sites had a significantly right-wing perspective, so Originality also looked at nine of the most well-known right-leaning outlets. Out of the nine right-wing sites, none were blocking GPTBot.
Bot Biases
Conservative leaders in the US (and also Elon Musk) have expressed concern that ChatGPT and other leading AI tools exhibit liberal or left-leaning political biases. At a recent hearing on AI, Senator Marsha Blackburn recited an AI-generated poem praising President Biden as evidence, claiming that generating a similar ode to Trump was impossible with ChatGPT. Right-leaning outlets might see their ideological foes’ decisions to block AI web crawlers as a unique opportunity to redress the balance.
David Rozado, a data scientist based in New Zealand who developed an AI model called RightWingGPT to explore bias he perceived in ChatGPT, says that’s a plausible-sounding strategy. “From a technical point of view, yes, a media company allowing its content to be included in AI training data should have some impact on the model parameters,” he says.
However, Jeremy Baum, an AI ethics researcher at UCLA, says he’s skeptical that right-wing sites declining to block AI scraping would have a measurable effect on the outputs of finished AI systems such as chatbots. That’s in part because of the sheer volume of older material AI companies have already collected from mainstream news outlets before they started blocking AI crawlers, and also because AI companies tend to hire liberal-leaning employees.
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“A process called reinforcement learning from human feedback is used right now in every state-of-the-art model,” to fine-tune its responses, Baum says. Most AI companies aim to create systems that appear neutral. If the humans steering the AI see an uptick of right-wing content but judge it to be unsafe or wrong, they could undo any attempt to feed the machine a certain perspective.
OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood says that in pursuit of AI models that “deeply represent all cultures, industries, ideologies, and languages” the company uses broad collections of training data. “Any one sector—including news—and any single news site is a tiny slice of the overall training data, and does not have a measurable effect on the model’s intended learning and output,” she says.
Rights Fights
The disconnect in which news sites block AI crawlers could also reflect an ideological divide on copyright. The New York Times is currently suing OpenAI for copyright infringement, arguing that the AI upstart’s data collection is illegal. Other leaders in mainstream media also view this scraping as theft. Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch recently said at a Senate hearing that many AI tools have been built with “stolen goods.” (WIRED is owned by Condé Nast.) Right-wing media bosses have been largely absent from the debate. Perhaps they quietly allow data scraping because they endorse the argument that data scraping to build AI tools is protected by the fair use doctrine?
For a couple of the nine right-wing outlets contacted by WIRED to ask why they permitted AI scrapers, their responses pointed to a different, less ideological reason. The Washington Examiner did not respond to questions about its intentions but began blocking OpenAI’s GPTBot within 48 hours of WIRED’s request, suggesting that it may not have previously known about or prioritized the option to block web crawlers.
Meanwhile, the Daily Caller admitted that its permissiveness toward AI crawlers had been a simple mistake. “We do not endorse bots stealing our property. This must have been an oversight, but it's being fixed now,” says Daily Caller cofounder and publisher Neil Patel.
Right-wing media is influential, and notably savvy at leveraging social media platforms like Facebook to share articles. But outlets like the Washington Examiner and the Daily Caller are small and lean compared to establishment media behemoths like The New York Times, which have extensive technical teams.
Data journalist Ben Welsh keeps a running tally of news websites blocking AI crawlers from OpenAI, Google, and the nonprofit Common Crawl project whose data is widely used in AI. His results found that approximately 53 percent of the 1,156 media publishers surveyed block one of those three bots. His sample size is much larger than Originality AI’s and includes smaller and less popular news sites, suggesting outlets with larger staffs and higher traffic are more likely to block AI bots, perhaps because of better resourcing or technical knowledge.
At least one right-leaning news site is considering how it might leverage the way its mainstream competitors are trying to stonewall AI projects to counter perceived political biases. “Our legal terms prohibit scraping, and we are exploring new tools to protect our IP. That said, we are also exploring ways to help ensure AI doesn’t end up with all of the same biases as the establishment press,” Daily Wire spokesperson Jen Smith says. As of today, GPTBot and other AI bots were still free to scrape content from the Daily Wire.
Updated at 10:20 am ET, January 24, 2024, to include the specific number of top news sites from which Originality AI collected data.
