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BBC Good Food has blocked ChatGPT from harvesting recipes from its website amid fears that “robot chef” chatbots will replace cooking publishers.
The cooking magazine, which has the UK’s most popular recipe website, has added code to its site that stops ChatGPT from “crawling” web pages to train the chatbot.
It comes amid fears that cooking websites and recipe books will become obsolete if people can ask chatbots for meal instructions.
Magazine publisher Immediate Media, which owns BBC Good Food and licenses the BBC name from the broadcaster’s commercial arm, said it was testing the block to determine how the rise of AI bots are affecting readership.
It has also applied the restrictions to other magazines including Radio Times, BBC Top Gear and Gardeners World.
The block is the latest in a rebellion against ChatGPT from major websites seeking to stop the chatbot from profiting from their material.
Major news publishers including the New York Times and CNN have blocked ChatGPT from scraping data from their websites and others have threatened to sue OpenAI, the company that develops the bot, for copyright infringement.
The likes of Amazon and Disney have also blocked the company’s software.
ChatGPT, which has amassed tens of millions of users since its launch last November, is “trained” using data from millions of web pages, which allows it to produce information on questions instantly.
Generating recipes and meal plans has been one of the bot’s most popular uses. An upgraded version is able to create recipes based on a picture of the contents of a fridge.
Chris Galvin, a Michelin star chef, told The Telegraph earlier this year that ChatGPT’s recipes were “very impressive”.
However, there have been concerns that the bot will produce dangerous recipes or fail to follow instructions, such as avoiding allergens or ignoring dietary restrictions.
ChatGPT represents a potential threat to recipe websites, which have spent years fine-tuning their pages to appear at the top of Google’s search results.
Online recipes are notorious for forcing readers to scroll through large amounts of text before they reach the lists of ingredients, a consequence of the way Google’s ranking algorithm rewards sites with more material on them.
An Immediate Media spokesman said: “We are constantly testing and learning around AI, including testing tools to explore the impact of AI bots on Immediate Media’s sites as well as what content we want to serve them. This is not a permanent policy, and we expect things to evolve rapidly.”
The policy is unrelated to the BBC, which is understood to be separately reviewing its policy regarding chatbots. Immediate Media acquired BBC Good Food in 2018.