Several French outlets, including those under Radio France, France24 and TF1, have blocked data collection by GPTBot, the crawler bot created by OpenAI to train ChatGPT, to prevent artificial intelligence algorithms from exploiting their content. , as reported by the newspaper Les Échos.
The French media thus join the decision taken a few days ago by Anglo-Saxon media such as the New York Times, CNN, Reuters or Bloomberg, among many others, and by large companies such as Amazon or Ikea.
As soon as OpenAI revealed a few weeks ago that it was tracking and collecting massive amounts of information from the internet to train its GPT-4 and GPT-5 models, some of the most important websites in the world moved to block its crawler robot. , GPTBo.
According to an analysis by Originality.ai, a company that checks if content is AI-generated or plagiarized, more than 15% of the 100 most popular websites decided to block GPTBot in the last two weeks, as reported by Insider.
According to the French newspaper Les Échos, Radio France and TF1 have blocked the OpenAI tool so that it cannot collect data from their websites after doing so on all France Médias Monde websites, such as France24.com, RFI.fr or mc- doualiya.com.
The director of digital environments for the latter group, Vicent Fleury, assured Euroactiv that the measure responds to the fact that “as a public service, we invest money and people in the creation of content. We don’t want our data to train the model for free. We don’t want OpenAI to allow other companies to create value with our content […] without getting anything in return.”
At the time of announcing that it was using the GPTBot crawler, OpenAI offered website publishers the ability to ban access to the bot, which is what many have done. Most of the media that have applied the blockade claim the need to receive fair remuneration for the use of their content, in a similar way to what they negotiated in the form of payment of rights with platforms such as Google or Facebook.
