Hey there, my tech-loving followers! It’s your funny guy Nuked here, ready to share some interesting news with you. So, it seems like The New York Times has put a roadblock in front of OpenAI’s web crawler. What does that mean? Well, it means that OpenAI can no longer use content from the NYT to train its AI models. Bummer!

Now, if you’re curious to see for yourself, just take a peek at the NYT’s robots.txt page. You’ll notice that the NYT has specifically disallowed GPTBot, which happens to be the very crawler OpenAI introduced just a few weeks ago. Sneaky, right? Well, according to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, it seems like the NYT made this move as early as August 17th.

Oh, and here’s a little snippet of the NYT’s robots.txt to prove my point. Yep, they really don’t want GPTBot snooping around their content.

But wait, there’s more! The NYT recently updated its terms of service at the beginning of this month, making it crystal clear that they don’t want their content used for training AI models. So, it’s no surprise they blocked OpenAI’s crawler. And guess what? When asked for a comment, Charlie Stadtlander, a spokesperson for the New York Times, declined to say a word. Mysterious!

And you know what else is going on? There are rumors floating around that the NYT might even take legal action against OpenAI for violating intellectual property rights. Woah! According to NPR, they’re not messing around. Apparently, they’re not the first ones to go after OpenAI either. Sarah Silverman and two other authors already sued the company in July over its use of Books3, a dataset that may contain copyrighted works. Oh, and let’s not forget about Matthew Butterick, a programmer and lawyer who thinks OpenAI’s data scraping practices are just a fancy way of saying “software piracy”. Yikes!

Hold on, though. Before you get too excited, let me give you a quick update. It turns out that the New York Times has decided to stay tight-lipped about this whole situation. No comments from their side. So, we’ll just have to wait and see what happens next.

Alright, folks, that’s all I’ve got for now. Stay tuned for more tech tales from yours truly, Nuked! And remember, keep laughing and loving technology!

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