The New York Times and other mainstream media outlets are currently suing AI companies like OpenAI for copyright infringement, viewing data scraping as theft. In contrast, right-wing media outlets have been largely absent from this debate. Some right-wing outlets contacted by WIRED admitted that their permissiveness toward AI crawlers had been a mistake, while others are considering how to leverage this situation to counter perceived political biases in AI.
Key takeaways:
- Over 88% of top-ranked news outlets in the US block web crawlers used by artificial intelligence companies to collect training data for AI projects, with right-wing media being a notable exception.
- Data collected by Originality AI shows that 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.
- There are speculations that this could be a strategy by right-wing outlets to combat perceived political bias in AI models, which reflect the biases of their training data.
- The New York Times is currently suing OpenAI for copyright infringement, arguing that the AI company's data collection is illegal, reflecting a potential ideological divide on copyright within the news industry.