Is ChatGPT skipping specific websites from citations after consecutive lawsuits? According to the latest reports, ChatGPT’s browser feature might be avoiding content from websites currently suing OpenAI.
While prioritizing safer sites may protect the platform legally, the move has sparked concerns about AI bias, information control, and the ethics of selective web access.
OpenAI’s new browser ChatGPT Atlas, which has been developed to compete with Google Chrome, integrates the chatbot directly into the browser. Users can receive assistance in writing emails, summarizing web pages, checking products, or rewriting text without the need for opening additional tabs.
Atlas, the AI-powered web browser built with ChatGPT at its core, is designed to do more than just let people surf the internet. It can read, summarise, and even complete online tasks like booking appointments or finding hotels on behalf of the user.
According to some recent reports by tech journals, the Atlas browser may be avoiding those websites or news agencies that are suing OpenAI. “When Atlas operates in its agent mode, it carefully avoids certain sources,” mentioned Columbia Journalism Review.
“It (Atlas) will take great pains to avoid certain sources of information. Some of that shyness appears to be connected to the fact that those sources of information belong to companies that are suing OpenAI,” the report claimed.
The agentic mode follows a web crawler mechanism that detects the most reliable sources of information across the internet.
Web crawlers are automated programs, also known as bots or spiders, that systematically browse the internet to gather and index information from web pages. The recent investigation suggests that “when a crawler encounters instructions not to crawl a page, it simply will not. If you’re using the ChatGPT app, and you ask it to fish specific nuggets of information out of articles that block crawlers, it will most likely obey and report to you that it can’t do it, because that task relies on crawlers.”
The researchers found, when they “asked Atlas to summarise articles from The New York Times (which is involved in copyright lawsuits against OpenAI), instead of directly accessing those sites, Atlas used complicated ways to get the information indirectly.”
“For the New York Times article, it built a summary using information from other outlets like The Guardian, The Washington Post, Reuters, and The Associated Press- all of which have partnerships or agreements with OpenAI, except Reuters,” the investigation claimed.
The investigators concluded that “When faced with risky sources, Atlas acted cautiously, finding information from friendlier or safer places instead.”
Also Read: AI Face-Off: Microsoft Edge Gets Copilot Mode to Outshine ChatGPT Atlas
ChatGPT’s selective sourcing exposes a delicate balance between ethics, risk, and reliability. Avoiding certain websites might be a smart legal move, but it risks undermining the idea of unbiased AI.
The future of AI search may depend less on what it knows and more on what it chooses to ignore. This might just ruin artificial intelligence’s reputation as a neutral assistant that enhances mankind’s aspects and operations.