 "Google Artificial intelligence, AI search, google")
By Nico Grant & Katie Robertson
When Frank Pine searched Google for a link to a news article two months ago, he encountered paragraphs generated by artificial intelligence (AI) about the topic at the top of his results. To see what he wanted, he had to scroll past them.
When Frank Pine searched Google for a link to a news article two months ago, he encountered paragraphs generated by artificial intelligence (AI) about the topic at the top of his results. To see what he wanted, he had to scroll past them.
That experience annoyed Pine, the executive editor of Media News Group and Tribune Publishing, which own 68 daily newspapers. Now, those paragraphs scare him.
In May, Google announced that the AI-generated summaries, which compile content from news sites and blogs on the topic being searched, would be made available to everyone in the US. And that change has publishing executives worried that the paragraphs pose a big danger to their brittle business model, by sharply reducing the amount of traffic to their sites from Google. “It potentially chokes off the original creators of the content,” Pine said.
Media executives have said they want their sites listed in Google’s search results, which for some outlets can generate over half of their traffic. But doing that means Google can use their content in AI Overviews summaries.
Publishers could also try to protect their content by forbidding Google’s web crawler from sharing any content snippets from their sites. But then their links would show up without any description, making people less likely to click.
Another alternative — refusing to be indexed by Google, and not appearing on its search engine at all — could be fatal to their business.
Google said its search engine continued to send billions of visits to websites, providing value to publishers. The firm has also said it has not showcased its AI summaries when it was clear that users were looking for current news.
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Liz Reid, Google’s vice president of search, said before the introduction of AI Overviews that there were hopeful signs for publishers during testing. “We do continue to see that people often do click on the links in AI Overviews and explore,” she said. “A website that appears in the AI Overview actually gets more traffic” than one with just a traditional blue link.
Reid wrote in a blog post Thursday that Google would limit AI Overviews to a smaller set of search results after it produced some high-profile errors, but added that the firm was still committed to improving the system.
The use of articles from news sites has also set off a legal fight over whether firms like OpenAI and Google violated copyright law by taking the content without permission to build their AI models. AI Overviews combines statements generated from AI models with snippets of content from live links across the web. The summaries contain excerpts from multiple websites while citing sources, giving comprehensive answers without the user having to click to another page. Since its debut, the tool has not always been able to differentiate between accurate articles and satirical posts. When it recommended that users put glue on pizza or eat rocks for a balanced diet, it caused a furore online.
Publishers said in interviews that it was too early to see a difference in traffic from Google since AI Overviews arrived.
Newspapers such as The Washington Post and The Texas Tribune have turned to a marketing start-up, Subtext, that helps firms connect with subscribers and audiences through text messaging. Then there’s the dispute over copyright. It took a turn when OpenAI, which scraped news sites to build ChatGPT, started cutting deals with publishers. It said it would pay firms, including The Associated Press, The Atlantic and News Corp, which owns WSJ, to access their content. But Google has not yet signed similar deals. The firm has long resisted calls to compensate media firms for their content, arguing that such payments would undermine the nature of the open web.
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