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Microsoft's OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT (2), has launched a new tool that crawls around the web and all the existing websites to gather and consume the data for enhancing ChatGPT's content quality and information (3).
This bot without access permission could anytime crawl your website and note down all the data and information which will then become its content when someone needs relevant information.
However, it has also developed a way for you to stop or deny access to its website crawler GPTBot by introducing a code input in robot.txt which automatically blocks all access and requests to enter and consume your website.
OpenAI aims on expanding the database of its ever-popular ChatGPT and has also hinted more new updates are upcoming in the next week. ChatGPT is getting more advanced and OpenAI is counteracting with the audience with a safe play by introducing a disease and also its remedy to avoid.
What is GPTBot?
GPTBot is a generative AI tool developed by Microsoft's OpenAI, the team behind ChatGPT. It is developed for generating publicly accessible data by crawling websites and consuming their information in its database to train AI models.
How does GPTBot work?
GPTBot revolves around the web and consumes all the information from the website and stores it in its database which then reflects in ChatGPT's generative response with relevant information and in a more transparent manner.
OpenAI also served its users with a way to tackle GPTBot from entering their website, by installing a code into the robot.txt file which blocks away the access of their new tool, to keep the user's website content private and secured.
Understanding GPTBot
If you are aware of ChatGPT then you might also be aware of the controversies surrounding it for releasing and gathering content from the web without any consent of the respected websites.
In response to all the controversies, OpenAI released GPTBot which crawls websites on the web automatically and "with consent." In the document released, OpenAI mentioned their new tool will filter to remove sources that require paywall access and also eliminate texts that violate its standard policies.
However, he stretched that allowing access to its bot would be beneficial for creating an accurate sense of information flow for ChatGPT's generative response and overall AI systems in the upcoming generative AI-enhanced future.
GPTBot can be identified as:
User-agent token: GPTBot
Full user-agent string: Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; GPTBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/gptbot)
Meanwhile, the company also allows users to disable GPTBot from accessing any website. But you will have to manually add this feature to disable OpenAI from accessing, all you have to do is add GPTBot to your website's robot.txt file.
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /
Moreover, to control the access of GPTBot input the below-mentioned code into the robot.txt file:
User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /directory-1/
Disallow: /directory-2/
Open Note
OpenAI openly acknowledges that it is scraping the web and internet ecosystem by training its language models but its recent launch is toward a transparent approach addressing the ethical dilemmas surrounding it related to copyrights.
OpenAI also recently filed to trademark "GPT-5" with hints of the company training a new version of GPT-4. However, GPTBot is surely to help OpenAI in several ways since the enable/disable feature does not prone down toward it being unethical.
