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Google AI

Google's AI Mode Is 'the Definition of Theft,' Publishers Say 25

Posted by BeauHD from the worse-for-everyone dept.
Google's new AI Mode for Search, which is rolling out to everyone in the U.S., has sparked outrage among publishers, who call it "the definition of theft" for using content without fair compensation and without offering a true opt-out option. Internal documents revealed by Bloomberg earlier this week suggest that Google considered giving publishers more control over how their content is used in AI-generated results but ultimately decided against it, prioritizing product functionality over publisher protections.

News/Media Alliance slammed Google for "further depriving publishers of original content both traffic and revenue." Their full statement reads: "Links were the last redeeming quality of search that gave publishers traffic and revenue. Now Google just takes content by force and uses it with no return, the definition of theft. The DOJ remedies must address this to prevent continued domination of the internet by one company." 9to5Google's take: It's not hard to see why Google went the route that it did here. Giving publishers the ability to opt out of AI products while still benefiting from Search would ultimately make Google's flashy new tools useless if enough sites made the switch. It was very much a move in the interest of building a better product.

Does that change anything regarding how Google's AI products in Search cause potential harm to the publishing industry? Nope.

Google's tools continue to serve the company and its users (mostly) well, but as they continue to bleed publishers dry, those publishers are on the verge of vanishing or, arguably worse, turning to cheap and poorly produced content just to get enough views to survive. This is a problem Google needs to address, as it's making the internet as a whole worse for everyone.

Google's AI Mode Is 'the Definition of Theft,' Publishers Say More | Reply

Google's AI Mode Is 'the Definition of Theft,' Publishers Say

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  • Maybe they need a dictionary? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Whatever this is, it's definitely not "the definition of theft."

  • Create websites of meaningless drivel and exceptionally long, deliberately poorly formatted prose to maximize the number of ads you can shovel at people, and of course we're going to favor a tool that can summarize the bullshit and eliminate the ads .Find a better business model, or gtfo.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Moryath ( 553296 )

      SEO was a result of trying to vie for placement in the Google search listings.

      Now Google is just plain stealing the content the same way that Facebook did with "content preview."

    • Create websites of meaningless drivel and exceptionally long, deliberately poorly formatted prose to maximize the number of ads you can shovel at people, and of course we're going to favor a tool that can summarize the bullshit and eliminate the ads .Find a better business model, or gtfo.

      Google to the rescue. Take that nasty ads!

  • We normal viewers usually run into paywalls to read your crap^^^^Hcontent, do the same for Gewgle and stop complaining.
  • -dweeb?" - Google, as capitalism slowly collapses in on itself over the post scarcity of replicating information but non post scarcity of producing it.

  • robots.txt is the opt-out.

    You can't eat your cake and have it too. The new results pages of many search engines will look like this. Exclude yourself from their index, if you don't want to appear there.

    • What great choices! Use robots.txt and disappear from the search results, or we'll take your content and use it in such a way that there is no need for people to visit your website, thus robbing you of the chance to make a buck on advertising.

      • Looks like the ad driven web may be heading to an end. That's a shame because unless we get a way to open one account that we can allow a website to access to pay with, I'm not getting an account for every website on the Internet that "might" be interesting or worth it.

        Of course, with AI committing copyright violations, you get no traffic anyway. You could just pay out of pocket. Maybe your mom will read your site :)

  • Most of these sites are garbage, existing for no reason other than to catch clicks and serve ads.

    Websites that have an actual reason to exist, won't be harmed by AI Mode.

    In life, and on the web, you can tell a lot about the value of a thing, based on one principle: Is somebody pushing it on you, or are you looking for it? If somebody is pushing their thing on you, it's definitely not as valuable as the pusher makes it seem. If you really need it, you'll go looking for it.

    • Is it pushy to wonder if SEO CEOs would be better off on a generous, inflation-proofed, non-tax-funded basic income, because they could just enjoy content instead of selling it?

    • >catch clicks and serve ads

      You are stuck in 2005. Sites like that haven't been seen in google in 20 years.

      >Websites that have an actual reason to > exist, won't be harmed by AI Mode.

      What about people like Tomiko Harvey who was making $12000 a month off her travel blog, and home spun recipe sites. She got nailed with all the AI updates and now makes $300 a month of the same content. https://tomikoharvey.com/googl... [tomikoharvey.com]

      50% of the ad supported website that existed off Google referrals will be don

      • You are stuck in 2005. Sites like that haven't been seen in google in 20 years.

        Today's version looks different, but it's not really that different. These days, the SEO garbage shows you interesting search result listings, but when you click the link, you are immediately confronted with a paywall, or a scraped clone of another site's user discussion, with multiple ads per comment. The death of those old SEO sites has been greatly exaggerated.

  • Soon all they will have left to steal will be their own excrement.

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