Senate Leaders Ask FTC To Investigate AI Content Summaries As Anti-Competitive (techcrunch.com) 54
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A group of Democratic senators is urging the FTC and Justice Department to investigate whether AI tools that summarize and regurgitate online content like news and recipes may amount to anticompetitive practices. In a letter to the agencies, the senators, led by Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), explained their position that the latest AI features are hitting creators and publishers while they're down. As journalistic outlets experience unprecedented consolidation and layoffs, "dominant online platforms, such as Google and Meta, generate billions of dollars per year in advertising revenue from news and other original content created by others. New generative AI features threaten to exacerbate these problems."
The letter continues: "While a traditional search result or news feed links may lead users to the publisher's website, an AI-generated summary keeps the users on the original search platform, where that platform alone can profit from the user's attention through advertising and data collection. [] Moreover, some generative AI features misappropriate third-party content and pass it off as novel content generated by the platform's AI. Publishers who wish to avoid having their content summarized in the form of AI-generated search results can only do so if they opt out of being indexed for search completely, which would result in a materially significant drop in referral traffic. In short, these tools may pit content creators against themselves without any recourse to profit from AI-generated content that was composed using their original content. This raises significant competitive concerns in the online marketplace for content and advertising revenues."
Essentially, the senators are saying that a handful of major companies control the market for monetizing original content via advertising, and that those companies are rigging that market in their favor. Either you consent to having your articles, recipes, stories, and podcast transcripts indexed and used as raw material for an AI, or you're cut out of the loop. The letter goes on to ask the FTC and DOJ to investigate whether these new methods are "a form of exclusionary conduct or an unfair method of competition in violation of the antitrust laws." [...] The letter was co-signed by Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Tina Smith (D-MN).
The letter continues: "While a traditional search result or news feed links may lead users to the publisher's website, an AI-generated summary keeps the users on the original search platform, where that platform alone can profit from the user's attention through advertising and data collection. [] Moreover, some generative AI features misappropriate third-party content and pass it off as novel content generated by the platform's AI. Publishers who wish to avoid having their content summarized in the form of AI-generated search results can only do so if they opt out of being indexed for search completely, which would result in a materially significant drop in referral traffic. In short, these tools may pit content creators against themselves without any recourse to profit from AI-generated content that was composed using their original content. This raises significant competitive concerns in the online marketplace for content and advertising revenues."
Essentially, the senators are saying that a handful of major companies control the market for monetizing original content via advertising, and that those companies are rigging that market in their favor. Either you consent to having your articles, recipes, stories, and podcast transcripts indexed and used as raw material for an AI, or you're cut out of the loop. The letter goes on to ask the FTC and DOJ to investigate whether these new methods are "a form of exclusionary conduct or an unfair method of competition in violation of the antitrust laws." [...] The letter was co-signed by Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Tina Smith (D-MN).
Dumb idea` (Score:2)
I use AI all the time INSTEAD of using a search engine. As long as you're careful to examine the results and double check anything that's suspicious or critical, it's much, much easier to find stuff. You can ask the AI incredibly obscure questions and get a summary that's exactly what you're looking for.
The old way was ask google a question, get a list of webpages where your answer *might* just be buried somewhere in one of those pages. Spend the next half hour reading through webpages trying to find tha
Re:Dumb idea` (Score:5, Insightful)
Dumbing down the internet because some website aggregator is upset they can't monetize what an AI does
It's not necessarily that the internet should be dumbed down, But the Publisher who made the content used by the AI should have the right to payment. And they should also have the right to say important portions work they authored an AI is not allowed to process into a summary.
That's not a fair use to simply process important parts of someone's work and automatically reformulate the expression to match the question.
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That's not a fair use to simply process important parts of someone's work and automatically reformulate the expression to match the question.
Humans do this all the time and they don't always cite the source.
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Humans do this all the time and they don't always cite the source.
Humans have their own intelligence and creativity and are allowed to be recognized as authors. While humans do that: Valuable labor is extended to do so - you don't have humans processing other peoples' work in bulk for essentially free.
As for failures to cite the source: It is potentially plagiarism and academically dishonest; stealing ideas and implying you created them or trying to pass them off as ones own. But not illegal.
My sugges
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Yep, no logical consistency problems there at all......
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Any publisher can easily slap down AI summarization by making it entirely redundant with one simple step: Have their editors go back to enforcing the inverted-pyramid style on their writers. When the first paragraph *IS* the summary of the rest of the article; there's no need an AI to do the job... which *SHOULD* have been done by the writer, and enforced by the editor, in the first place. If those people refuse to di their jobs though... why shouldn't the AI go ahead and handle it?
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The problem with that comparison is that there are powerful open-weights LLMs that anyone can run. Which offers the added advantage of perfect privacy. Nothing leaves the computer, and both inputs and outputs vanish as soon as the memory is cleared.
While for the foreseeable future one can expect the most powerful LLMs to be run on the cloud, I expect in the coming years a steadily increasing percentage of user-end LLM work to be done on local machines as the hardware becomes more capable.
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Which offers the added advantage of perfect privacy. Nothing leaves the computer, and both inputs and outputs vanish as soon as the memory is cleared.
As you said right after this, LLMs are still run in the cloud. We aren't at a point yet where using them is private or anonymous.
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As you said right after this, LLMs are still run in the cloud. We aren't at a point yet where using them is private or anonymous.
Yes we are.
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* Is the information correct? Nobody knows. You can spend the next half hour and verify if things were taken out of context or not
* What's the source? Nobody knows, but with advanced models maybe you get sources, in which case you still have to spend your half hour and ensure that things are correct
* Will it remain nice and ad-free? Of course not. How is it going to get monetized? Not in a nice way for the user, that I'm sure about. Nothing's free.
* Is it better t
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You can spend the next half hour and verify if things were taken out of context or not
It's probably still better than today's alternative, which is to spend a couple of hours digging through paid ads and through pages of SEO results, then having to go through any number of spam pages to find some buried nugget of information.
It used to be that search engines like Google would put the relevant result first, or at least on the first page. They also let you narrow down the query, look for an exact string, and so on. It hasn't been the case for quite some time now; for example, Google et. al. o
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Unfortunately, that still leaves it as the most useful search engine I have found to date. I wish somebody else could manage to create one that's even close to as good as Google was
Obligatory (Score:2)
This is why we can't have nice things.
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We can, if google and others start to pay for contents they scrape.
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....except this is literally not about scraping, but summarizing. They're pissed that organizations can now engage in lawful copying at scale and want to charge them with contempt of business model.
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They need to scrape so their AI is able to summarize. It's the same as google news summarzing news, and several countries have made them to pay. It should be the same for things other than news.
Google paying for access to summarize news:
2020-10 The company said Thursday that it has signed agreements for its news partnership program with nearly 200 publications in Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Canada, the U.K. and Australia. https://finance.yahoo.com/news... [yahoo.com]
2021-11 The AFP accord follows France enacting a copyright law that creates “neighboring rights,” requiring big tech companies to open talks with news publishers that want a licensing payment. https://www.reuters.com/techno... [reuters.com]
2022-05 Google will pay more than 300 publishers in the European Union for their news, the company has said, following the adoption of landmark EU copyright rules published three years ago. https://www.euronews.com/next/... [euronews.com]
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....and that is not illegal. Like I said, they're being hit with Contempt of Business Model because the assumptions underpinning how these businesses work has been upended, so now they want to change the law to our collective detriment.
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Someone's got to pay. The current (AI) system strips away the advantages of producing honest content. If this goes on, the honest content will disappear.
Cut the bullshit (Score:3)
I'd rather have an AI-generated summary rather than wasting 5 minutes on reading an article which can be summarised in a single sentence. This use for AI is not anticompetitive. It is actually helpful and removes the unnecessary bloat. The bloat which "creators" use to justify their salaries.
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How about *both*. It is both anti-competitive and helpful. The two are not incompatible, at least not at a single timepoint. (They likely are incompatible over time...but over time I suspect the current system will become less helpful as there are fewer and fewer updated pages to scrape.)
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Yeah. It's the same reason why it's so annoying when someone responds to a post online with, "Nuh uh, I disagree, but instead of telling you why, I'm going to insist that you watch this hour-long video." Dude, I'm not going to watch an hour-long video because of some rando on the internet; give me a summary of your key takeaways from the video.
Re:Cut the bullshit (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd rather have an AI-generated summary rather than wasting 5 minutes on reading an article which can be summarised in a single sentence. This use for AI is not anticompetitive. It is actually helpful and removes the unnecessary bloat. The bloat which "creators" use to justify their salaries.
Yea the real takeaway here is that the news sites should be providing the summaries as many people would prefer them, but then that would mean fewer users would need to scroll past all of the scammy click-bait ads.
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AI summaries wouldn't be necessary if publications went back to hiring actual writers who've been trained how to write a proper inverted-pyramid article.
Yeah... I get the whole "democratizing the media" aspect of the internet. But that should be for individual peoples' blogs. Any sort of newspaper or magazine or the like, dead-tree or electronic, should absolutely be written to the inverted-pyramid style. Hell... you don't even need to be a journalism major... that's even taught in the 101-level elective
I think final legal question is of AI Personhood (Score:2)
We notice that the legal argument against AI by writers and artists is that it is a form of data compression and past cases established that data compression and copying the compressed versions of data, even if lossy, still constitutes copying.
I disagree with this argument used against LLMs. However, it is a pretty good argument. Indeed, it amalgamates information and can recreate similar works to what it has read. It does so in a very similar way to a human mind, though, and yet we allow humans to do th
It's just a statistical algorithm backed by data (Score:2)
There's no person or intelligence there. No court is going to rule personhood for such a construct. Until the jury can hear the AI actually understand that it's being tried in a court and can respond intelligently, that's going to be true.
I won't be holding my breath. Too much money on the other side of the equation. Understand that media is fundamentally paid to produce propaganda. Can I pay Google to create custom propaganda for me? Consider the garbage - palpable bullshit - results from so-called A
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Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Just a stunt to advertise an event in Riyadh.
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Ironic (Score:5, Insightful)
99% of what's on most news sites is regurgitation. Only a few top news sources actually do original reporting and have a network of reporters who go places to find things out any more. I can see why they're miffed and think we need to find a way to get them paid. But all the (human-powered) news-sites that just do what AI does, but manually, need to think very carefully about cheering against AI because they are doing the exactly the same thing from the perspective of intellectual property rights.
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Bingo! Even the title of this article cites "An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch"
I don't think news aggregator sites will go away because of AI. I come here to read the comments just as much as the articles and I can definitely say that some aggregators are using AI to generate their own scraped content articles.
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We're reading about this on a news aggregator that doesn't even combine and paraphrase the articles, but just copies and pastes the text onto its front page.
That's not quite accurate. The submitters and editors on this site usually somehow mangle the summary so bad that you have no recourse but to look at the original site to figure out WTF is wrong with TFS.
AI or summaries the problem? (Score:2)
What's the problem? Is it that news sources can be summarized or that those summaries could be generated by AI? What if the summaries were written by humans? Would that solve the problem? Seems to me that the real problem is the summaries and not AI but that AI grabs the headlines.
Maybe real concerns, but is it anti-competitive? (Score:2)
It's appropriate to consider whether there are harms here, but I don't see an argument here that it's anticompetitive. Unless I'm missing something (certainly possible), this seems like "we have tools to go after anti-competitive behaviour, we see a problem, let's pretend the problem is something that those tools are meant to solve".
Admittedly, if I'm right that that's what this is, it's not an unusual leap, but maybe we should want less of it.
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If Google has a near-monopoly on search then Google search results favouring Google content over its competitors' is anti-competitive. It's clear from TFS that the context here is the newish thing that Google search results do of putting an AI-generated answer to what they think the question is at the top of the search results, while the pages which were used to train the AI appear further down the page, or aren't even on it.
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That's not really a search result though, nor is it a funnel to send people to some google-run website.
I suppose if the results start to look like website there may begin to be a case there, but if it's a summary then it looks a lot like the existing in-site summaries like when you type "2+2" into google search and a calculator pops up with the result there.
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You aren't being forced to use google's search.
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G.D capitalist Google is giving too much stuff away for free; we need to kill Google --Dem party.
\o/ (Score:1)
Hey AI: I'm looking for legal ways to tax AI companies - please give me an initial list of ten methods of attack which appear from the outside to be simply government representing the people.
Thanks!
AI vs people (Score:2)
If I have human writers who scour the internet and other resources and write based on that how is that different from an automated system that does the same thing? It is like the delusion that all music is 100% original. My main issue with AI is that the info is frequently low quality.
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Low quality compared to what? I find that for my purposes, AI results are of high quality, though not google's summaries.
when in doubt (Score:2)
When in doubt, censor it!
LLMs are a joke (Score:3)
I find it hilarious that lawmakers are looking to prohibit one of the few things LLMs are actually pretty good at.
Possible solution (Score:2)
Break up Google and put search and AI in different fragments. Or just forbid Google from developing AI while it holds a virtual monopoly on search.
Then everyone can select to welcome search bots and ban AI content scraping bots on his website. This should alleviate much of the publishers' pains.