If you had artificial intelligence that can scan the entire internet for information and provide a summary whenever you need it, you might never have to read another news piece in your life.

As Google and other companies experiment with what’s known as generative AI, which generates new content by using historical data, media tycoons are living nightmares.

Google started releasing a new type of generative AI-powered search in May, in response to concerns expressed by industry watchers about the company’s potential role in supplying consumers with information after OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot gained popularity.

When a user enters a search query, the Search Generative Experience (SGE) product employs artificial intelligence (AI) to generate summaries based on whether Google’s system thinks the format will be helpful. As per Google’s summary of SGE, the summaries show up at the top of the search homepage along with buttons to “dig deeper.”

If publishers wish to stop Google’s AI from using their content to help create such summaries, they have to employ the same technology that would keep their content out of Google search results, making it almost completely invisible online.

For example, searching for “Who is Jon Fosse,” the recent laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature, yields three pages on the author and his body of work.

Connections to Fosse information on Wikipedia, NPR, The New York Times, and other websites may be found via drop-down buttons; further connections can be found to the right of the synopsis.

According to Google, the links in the AI-generated summaries are meant to serve as a starting point for further information. The summaries are reportedly compiled from a variety of web pages. To help it evolve and enhance the product, it characterises SGE as an opt-in experiment for users, incorporating feedback from news publishers and other sources.

Publishers have struggled to compete with Google for online advertising and have relied on the tech giant for search traffic for decades. The new search tool is the latest warning signal in this partnership.

Four major publishers who spoke to Reuters under the condition of anonymity to avoid complicating ongoing negotiations with Google said that the still-evolving product, which is currently available in the United States, India, and Japan, has raised concerns among publishers as they try to figure out their place in a world where AI could dominate how users find and pay for information.

These publishers argue that their concerns are about online traffic, whether or not they will be given credit for the information that appears in the SGE summaries, and whether or not the summaries are accurate. An important source of contention with AI is that publishers want payment for the content that Google and other AI companies use to train their tools.

“As we bring generative AI into Search, we’re continuing to prioritize approaches that send valuable traffic to a wide range of creators, including news publishers, to support a healthy, open web,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement.

Regarding payment, Google states that it is seeking feedback from publishers and other stakeholders in order to enhance its comprehension of the generative AI applications’ economic model.

Google-Extended is a new tool that allows publishers to prevent their content from being used by Google to train its AI models. The technology was launched by Google at the end of September.

According to Danielle Coffey, president and chief executive of the News Media Alliance, an industry trade group that has been pressing Congress on these issues, offering publishers the choice to opt out of being crawled for AI is a “good faith gesture.”

“Whether payments will follow is a question mark, and to what extent there is openness to having a healthier value exchange.”

Publishers cannot disable the summaries or the links that accompany them from being crawled for SGE using the new tool without having their content removed from standard Google search results.

In order to attract advertising, publishers need clicks, therefore being visible in Google searches is essential to their operations. According to an executive at one of the publications, the SGE design has moved the links that show up in traditional search lower down the page, potentially reducing traffic to those links by as much as 40%.

Even more concerning is the potential for online browsers to choose not to click on any of the links if the SGE passage satisfies their informational needs—for instance, by providing information on the ideal time of year to visit Paris without requiring them to visit the website of a travel magazine.

According to Nikhil Lai, senior analyst at Forrester Research, SGE is “definitely going to decrease publishers’ organic traffic and they’re going to have to think about a different way to measure the value of that content, if not click through rate.” Nevertheless, he thinks that the links publishers have in SGE will help to maintain their solid reputations.

Google claims that SGE was created to draw attention to online content.

“Any estimates about specific traffic impacts are speculative and not representative, as what you see today in SGE may look quite different from what ultimately launches more broadly in Search,” a company spokesperson said in a statement.

Publishers and other sectors have spent decades optimising their websites to appear prominently in traditional Google search results; however, these publishers claim they lack the necessary data to do the same for the new SGE summary.

“The new AI section is a black box for us,” said an executive at one publisher. “We don’t know how to make sure we’re a part of it or the algorithm behind it.”

According to Google, publishers can continue doing what they are already doing to appear in search results.

For a considerable amount of time, publishers have permitted Google to automatically scan and index their content through a software programme known as a “crawl,” or bot, in order to display it in search results. Google uses a process called “crawling” to index the web and display content in searches.

The main worry raised by publishers concerning SGE is this: they claim that Google is freely crawling their content in order to generate summaries that people can read instead of clicking on their links, and they are unsure of Google’s policy about blocking content from being crawled for SGE.

According to a publisher, Google’s latest search feature poses a greater threat to their business than an unauthorised crawler.

Google remained silent regarding that assessment.

Based on exclusive data from AI content detector Originality.ai, websites are refusing to allow their content to be utilised for AI when given the option, if doing so has no effect on search results. The New York Times and Washington Post are among the 27.4% of well-known websites that have blocked ChatGPT’s bot since its introduction on August 7. In contrast, 6% of users have blocked Google-Extended since its debut on September 28.

(Adapted from Reuters.com)