On June 30, the Independent Publishers Alliance submitted an antitrust complaint to the European Commission, accusing Google of abusing their content in its Overviews feature, driven by AI that can generate explicit content to the publishers’ disadvantage.
The complaint, backed by groups like Foxglove Legal and the Movement for an Open Web, condemns Google’s reliance on AI in search results, with publishers warning that by placing AI summaries on top of results pages, the tech giant is limiting access to original journalism.
The decision comes as tensions surrounding AI that writes explicit content continue wreaking destruction with ethical and competitive norms across the industry.
AI that Can Generate Explicit Content
Google’s AI Summaries are short, AI-powered summaries that appear in front of regular search links, often giving the user the answer. Rolled out across over 100 countries, the summaries are also being promoted.
But publishers assert that the new regime is financed by them, asserting in their formal complaint that the Chrome Parent is copying content from websites, then using it to feed its large language models (LLM), and without consent. These models, such as ones that are able to AI generate explicit content, generate summaries that reduce users’ need to go to original sources.
The complaint also warns that publishers have few choices but to do an opt-out, otherwise, they will vanish from search results entirely. Meanwhile, AI content specialist roles can be found more at tech firms like Google, leaving it to be seen whether high-quality journalism is being lost in the interest of speed and convenience.
Regulatory Pressure and Google’s Defense
To prevent what they term “serious irreparable harm” to the publishing business, the EU-UK alliance of independent publishers is asking regulators in the two regions to move fast and impose interim remedies. Grievance is part of a growing world campaign that seeks to protect digital media from unregulated AI activity.
Google justifies its AI Overviews as helping people to ask more questions, and that “billions of clicks” are still visiting sites each day. But the critics say the latest AI in content generation news is different, meaning smaller publishers are losing readers, ad money, and reader engagement.
“Independent news faces an existential threat: Google’s AI Overviews,” Foxglove Legal co-director Rosa Curling told Reuters.
Her group, along with others, believes it’s time publishers are offered the option not to have their work exploited by AI. This scandal exposes how AI content aggregation and the latest AI news content gathering techniques for web scraping are transforming the internet content economy.
Otherwise, Google’s AI Overviews have been compared to AI-generated clickbait, more designed to attract than inform.
The greater the platforms become engaged with AI-powered content insights, the more the war between original content creators and tech giants is going to escalate, especially when it involves AI that can generate explicit content.
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