Google’s pivot to artificial intelligence has news publishers freaking out—and running to the government.
“Agency intervention is necessary to stop the existential threat Google poses to original content creators,” the News/Media Alliance—a major news industry trade group—wrote in a letter to the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). It asked the agencies to use antitrust authority “to stop Google’s latest expansion of AI Overviews,” a search engine innovation that Google has been rolling out recently.
Google’s plain old top-of-page links to news outlets or other informational sites are disappearing in many searches. Now much of this prime search-results real estate is taken up by what Google is calling AI Overviews.
Overviews offer up short, AI-generated summaries paired with brief bits of text from linked websites. (If you haven’t used Google in a while, try it now and see for yourself.)
The results have been far from perfect (would you like some glue with that pizza?) and leave a lot of room for skepticism and interpretation. (This past weekend, Overviews fed me seemingly contradictory advice about baby fevers within a two-paragraph span.) But that’s also often true of what you would find from an old-school list of links and snippets. And Google has been inching away from link-prominent results for a while now, featuring brief bits of (non-AI-generated) content in response to many search queries and in the form of Q&A text throughout link pages. So the recent appearance of AI-generated text answers wasn’t even immediately noticeable to me.
But newspaper and magazine publishers sure are noticing.
Hellbound and Down 