As generative AI services like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Bing Chat, and Google Bard become increasingly used as alternatives to search engines, they are also facing some resistance from people and companies who don’t want their AI models trained on their online content.

Today, Google announced a new way for webmasters to allow its Bard and Vertex AI services to access their content, or to opt out of their use to train these API models.

in a blog postGoogle stated:

Today we’re announcing Google-Extended, a new control that publishers can use to manage whether their sites help improve Bard and Vertex AI generator APIs, including future generations of models that drive these products. By using Google-Extended to control access to website content, a website administrator can choose whether to help these AI models become more accurate and capable over time.

Support page For this new control offers additional information about Google-Extended:

Google-Extended does not have a separate HTTP request user agent string. Scanning is performed with existing Google user agent strings; The robots.txt user-agent token is used in a control capacity.

In addition to today’s announcement, Google stated that it will “explore additional machine-readable approaches to selection and control for Internet advertisers.” It including a link where those advertisers can subscribe to a mailing list where they will receive additional updates on Google about their efforts to improve site controls.

The debate over how generative AI services access online information for their use has grown over the past few months, particularly over how they can access copyrighted content. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has already been the subject of lawsuits from authors who claim it illegally lifted content from their books to create detailed summaries of their content.