OpenAI has launched SearchGPT, built on ChatGPT’s famous and widely used large language model (LLM).
OpenAI and other companies getting into the AI game, including Google, Meta, Microsoft, Perplexity AI, and dozens of others are constantly scraping the web for material to train and enhance their models on.
The aim is to make them smarter, while also generating more commercial applications for AI tools and platforms. The long-term goal is to achieve developed “True AI”, also known as Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
However, in the pursuit of revenue-generating solutions and an AI that could rival (or help) humanity, are we at risk of breaking the Internet as we know it?
We aren’t saying that in a joking, meme-related way; but seriously.
Why does AI pose a threat to the Internet?
Firstly, let’s look at how AI’s work.
You, the user puts in a question or prompt.
The AI ⏤ similar to a search engine ⏤ pulls together an answer. Except unlike search engines, AIs “generate” answers. So, they summarize material, whether that’s Wikipedia pages or YouTube transcripts.
That means OpenAI, Google, and every other company building AI models are training those models on everything that’s ever been published (online and offline, including books).
Naturally, publishers and creatives don’t want their work to be used as material to train a model. Publishers, such as media organizations want people to go to their websites. Otherwise, the revenue models of the media as we know it will breakdown completely.
Hence dozens of lawsuits being filed by the media, including News Corp (WSJ, New York Post, etc.) against Perplexity AI. The New York Times has filed a similar suit against OpenAI.
AI Copyright Infringement and Defending the Internet
In every anti-AI case, the claim is copyright infringement. However, what the New York Times and NewsCorp are defending are their revenue models, and ultimately, the Internet as we know it.
As Benjamin Brooks says in the MIT Technology Review: “If AI search becomes our primary portal to the web, it threatens to disrupt an already precarious digital economy.”
“The production of content online depends on a fragile set of incentives tied to virtual foot traffic: ads, subscriptions, donations, sales, or brand exposure.”
“By shielding the web behind an all-knowing chatbot, AI search could deprive creators of the visits and “eyeballs” they need to survive. If AI search breaks up this ecosystem, existing law is unlikely to help.”
“In search, content has the most impact when it is novel or distinctive, or when the creator is uniquely authoritative. By design, AI search aims to reproduce specific features from that underlying data, invoke the credentials of the original creator, and stand in place of the original content.”
It’s a disheartening thought. Although AI could do a lot of good, there’s numerous inherent dangers.
One of those is that there won’t be an incentive to publish useful content anymore because people will be shown answers in AI portals instead of going to the website to read/watch the original source of information.
Can I protect my work and website from AI?
Lawsuits take years; so for now, for individual website owners and creators, there are a few things you can do to prevent AI from scraping your work for Search results or training purposes.
However, you must remember that this could reduce your rankings if you want to appear in AI search results. So, do think how useful one option is over the other.
- Your website: Include Disallow commands in the Robots.txt files. Here’s a list of working ones for every type of AI bot.
- Microsoft Word: Go to file > Options > Trust Center > Trust Center Settings >Privacy Options > Privacy Settings > Connected Experiences. Toggle off to stop Microsoft from using everything you write in Word to train AI models.
- Apple: Preferences> Privacy. Toggle “Off” for sharing with AI.
- Amazon AWS and dozens of others tools and products you use also share with AI models, so you can find a very useful list in WIRED to switch off the sharing settings.
We hope this article has been helpful and has given you something to think about.
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