OpenAI claims that allowing GPTBot to access your website can enhance the accuracy and capabilities of AI models and improve their safety. However, this benefits OpenAI more than the owners of the websites from which the data is scraped.

AI chatbots like GPTBot gather information from websites, absorb it, and then reproduce it without acknowledging the source. This is different from Google’s Bard AI chatbot and Microsoft’s Bing Chat, which started providing citations in May 2023. But ChatGPT still does not offer citations. For instance, when I asked ChatGPT about recent innovations in solid-state batteries for electric cars, it provided examples but failed to provide any sources such as academic journals or news publications. An experiment conducted by Indiana University revealed that ChatGPT may even omit or misquote citations despite being given ample information in the prompt.

The main issue here is that once users obtain answers from ChatGPT, they may no longer feel the need to conduct their own Google searches or visit various websites for information. This means that publishers lose out on crucial web traffic, which is vital for their survival, especially if ChatGPT provides incorrect information.