Some web crawlers are beneficial, like GoogleBot which help Google index your website and content.
Pretty important if you want people to find your company online.
Other web crawlers don't have as clear a benefit to all. Some might even consider what they do creepy. OpenAI has launched its GPTBot with which the company will scrape the internet to collect training data for the next iteration of their LLM, probably GPT-5.
Training on live data from the internet will improve the LLM greatly, but the thought of a creepy crawler collecting content for training purposes has made some companies, publishers and artists especially, concerned.
In this blog post we look at the pros and cons of letting AI companies use content from your site as training data and provide you with some advice on whether or not to block these bots.
Why do AI companies want your content?
With the rise of artificial intelligence and large language models like GPT-4 and the upcoming GPT-5, there are concerns about web crawlers that are used to scrape and collect online content for training these models.
OpenAI's GPTBot is one such web crawler that is designed to gather data from the web to train their AI models.
But why bother collecting all that content?
Because using data from the internet as training data provides a vast and diverse source of information which simply put makes the LLM better.
The internet is filled with a wealth of knowledge, opinions, and real-world data that can be used to train AI models and improve their understanding and capabilities.
By analyzing and learning from a wide range of content, these models can develop a more comprehensive understanding of various topics and generate more accurate and relevant responses.
Furthermore, using internet content allows AI companies to train their models on real-time data, ensuring that the models are up-to-date and reflective of the current trends and information available online.
While this data collection can greatly enhance the accuracy and capabilities of AI models, it has raised questions about the impact on content creators and publishers.
Pros of letting AI companies use your content
Let's first take a look at the benefits of providing the AI companies with content from your site to use in the training of AI models:
1. Improved AI model accuracy: Allowing GPTBot to scrape your website provides valuable data that can be used to train AI models like GPT-4 and GPT-5.
By using real-life content from the web, these models can better understand and generate human-like responses, leading to improved accuracy in their outputs.
2. Enhanced capabilities: The more diverse and comprehensive the training data, the better the AI models become at understanding and generating various types of content.
Contributing your website's content, helps to expand the capabilities of AI models, enabling them to handle a wider range of topics and provide more relevant and helpful information.
3. Safety and ethics improvements: OpenAI is committed to ensuring the safety and ethical use of AI technology. By allowing GPTBot to access your site, you contribute to the data pool that OpenAI uses to identify and filter out sources that violate their policies, contain personally identifiable information, or are behind paywalls.
This helps improve the overall safety and ethical standards of AI models.
4. Contribution to the AI ecosystem: By granting access to GPTBot, you actively participate in the development and advancement of AI technology.
Your contribution helps shape future AI models and their capabilities, benefiting not only your own website but also the broader AI ecosystem.
5. Potential for increased organic traffic: While the immediate benefit may not be evident, contributing your content to thedata pool accessed by GPTBot can potentially lead to increased organic traffic in the long run.
As AI models like GPT-4 and GPT-5 become more sophisticated and accurate, they are likely to attract more users who rely on AI-generated content.
By having your website's content included in the training data, there is a higher chance that your site will be recommended by these AI models, leading to more organic traffic and potential conversions.
Cons of letting AI companies use your content
Now, let's look at the downsides, the reasons to maybe block creepy crawlers from collecting and using your content as training data:
1. Competition with AI-generated content: As AI models become more advanced, they have the potential to generate content that rivals or even surpasses human-generated content.
This can lead to a decrease in user visits to your website as they may find AI-generated content more convenient and reliable for their needs.
2. Loss of control over content: By granting access to GPTBot, you are essentially giving up control over how your content is used and presented.
The AI models may generate content based on your website's information, but you have no influence over the output or how it is attributed.
3. Intellectual property concerns: Allowing GPTBot to scrape your website's content raises concerns about intellectual property rights.
While OpenAI has policies in place to respect copyright and intellectual property, there is still a risk that your content may be used without proper authorization or compensation.
4. Dependence on AI-generated traffic: Relying heavily on AI-generated traffic can lead to a loss of independence and reliance on the algorithms and recommendations of AI models.
This can potentially limit your ability to build a loyal audience and establish your website as a trusted source of information.
5. Ethical considerations: The use of web crawlers like GPTBot raises ethical questions about data privacy and the potential misuse of personal information.
While OpenAI has stated that GPTBot filters out sources that violate their policies or gather personally identifiable information, there is always a risk of unintended data breaches or misuse.
Should you block AI companies from using your content?
While the decision to block GPTBot and other web crawlers from accessing your website ultimately depends on your specific goals and priorities, here are some scenarios where it may be advisable to do so:
Protection of intellectual property
If you have concerns about the unauthorized use or reproduction of your copyrighted content, preventing GPTBot from accessing your website can be a proactive measure to safeguard your intellectual property rights.
Maintaining control over content presentation
If maintaining control over how your content is used and attributed is important to you, blocking GPTBot can help ensure that your website's content is not altered or presented in a way that you cannot influence or approve of.
Data privacy and ethical considerations
If you have concerns about data privacy and the potential misuse of personal information, you may choose to block GPTBot to mitigate the risk of unintended data breaches or unethical use of the scraped data.
Some of the obvious industries that might want to block GPTBot are publishers and artists, but we've created a list of the businesses most likely to opt out of granting access to their content:
- Creative industries such as publishing, music, and film, where protecting intellectual property is crucial.
- E-commerce businesses that rely on unique product descriptions and images that they do not want to be used without authorization.
- News organizations that want to maintain control over how their content is presented and attributed.
- Educational institutions that want to protect their course materials and prevent unauthorized use or distribution.
- Healthcare companies that handle sensitive patient data and want to ensure data privacy and security.
- Financial institutions that deal with confidential client information and need to maintain data confidentiality.
- Government agencies that handle classified or sensitive information and require strict control over access.
- Startups and small businesses that rely on unique content to establish their brand and gain organic traffic.
- Non-profit organizations that want to protect their mission and messaging from being altered or misused.
This is how you block GPTBot from your website
It is important to consider the benefits and the potential drawbacks of allowing GPTBot access and using your content for training purposes before making a decision.
Granting access can contribute to the improvement of AI models and the overall AI ecosystem, but consider your own interests and whether it's best to protect your intellectual property.
To block GPTBot from accessing your website, you can modify your robots.txt file by adding the following lines:
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /
This will prevent GPTBot from accessing the entirety of your website.
However, if you wish to grant partial access to specific directories, you can customize the permissions by adding the following lines:
User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /directory-1/
Disallow: /directory-2/
By customizing the directories, you can have more control over which parts of your website GPTBot can access.
Please remember that there are other web crawlers out there and the provided lines only block GPTBot.
Granting GPTBot access might improve your SEO in the future
As an SEO marketer, it is crucial to prioritize your clients' interests and protect their assets. Blocking GPTBot can be a proactive measure to safeguard their copyrighted content, maintain control over content presentation, and protect data privacy and ethical considerations.
However, it might prove useful for SEO to let your content be used as training data since this will allow you to influence the AI model and where it draws its data from when answering queries.
Bing and Google are working on ways to provide links in AI generated search results and ChatGPT might follow suite. Being a part of the AI ecosystem can very well prove to be hugely beneficial.
Remember, the decision to block GPTBot is entirely up to you, and it should be based on your specific needs and concerns.
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