Poynter: “When I asked the latest artificial intelligence-powered search engine from ChatGPT what’s happening in my city of St. Petersburg, or Orlando and Miami, I didn’t find links to the largest newspapers in Florida. Instead, I found articles from the New York Post, The Sun, People Magazine — and real estate blogs St. Pete Rising and Miami Condo Investments. In an article in the Verge about ChatGPT’s new search feature, OpenAI’s Adam Fry said the firm’s publishing partners “won’t be automatically given higher priority in queries.” But I found that metro newspapers are underrepresented in news about local politics and elections, and a majority of links come from those with OpenAI deals. The three national outlets in my first search are owned by companies that have signed deals with OpenAI. The Poynter-owned Tampa Bay Times and Miami Herald have not. And the Orlando Sentinel and South Florida Sun-Sentinel are currently suing the AI company. “Due to ongoing legal proceedings between OpenAI and the South Florida Sun Sentinel, I am unable to provide direct excerpts from their articles,” yielded one search. I found similar responses when asking for New York Times articles about the presidential candidates. Of the first 100 links featured in my ChatGPT searches on Nov. 1, only 32 came from newsrooms that had not inked deals with OpenAI. Among those are local broadcast stations, the websites of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, blogs, Wikipedia, Ballotpedia and Reuters, which has licensing agreements with OpenAI investor Microsoft and Meta. “Of course, for now it is an empirical question to what degree SearchGPT actually links to non-OpenAI publishing partners, so anecdotal accounts have to be treated with caution,” said Felix Simon, postdoctoral research fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, in an email. “However, it should not be surprising if the system predominantly links to responses from partners. After all, this is likely to have been part of the deals these publishers struck with OpenAI, with these deals allowing OpenAI to display news content in their services without getting more lawsuits lobbed at them for doing so.”

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