"When Google became the dominant search engine around 2004, not everyone was happy. Everyone from book publishers to music studios blasted the company for helping itself to copyrighted content without paying. The search giant eventually smoothed things over but now, twenty years later, Google has become the media industry's villain all over again-this time for gobbling that same content to train its AI tools."
"Speaking at Fortune's Brainstorm Tech conference on Wednesday, People Inc CEO Neil Vogel-whose firm's titles include People and Food & Wine-said other big AI firms are paying for publishers to use the content they create, but that Google has so far refused. "Some AI shops are good actors. Open AI is a good guy," said Vogel. "The worst guy is Google.""
"Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, who was also on Wednesday's Brainstorm panel, said it has become far harder for websites to attract traffic at a time when AI firms serve as "answer engines" that provide what people are looking for in quick snippets. Prince observed that, in the past, Google served as a "great patron" to the Internet by ingesting the content of web pages in order to display links to those pages."
Google is accused of using publishers' copyrighted content to train AI models without paying for the material. Other major AI firms reportedly pay publishers for use of their content, while Google has declined to do so. Publishers and news organizations are pursuing deals and lawsuits over AI training on their content, including a New York Times suit against OpenAI alleging unauthorized training; OpenAI has called the suit baseless. AI-generated 'answer engines' increasingly deliver direct answers that reduce referral traffic to websites by replacing link-based search results. Google supplies many AI answers using information crawled from company websites, deepening publishers' traffic and revenue concerns.
Read at Fortune
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]