Google’s AI Overviews Hit With Fierce Criticism Amid Growing Controversy Over Content Misuse
The latest I/O developer’s conference by Google brought to light a lot of interesting and innovative perspectives related to the world of AI.
The company put forward a new vision that it predicted for the future including how online search would undergo a revolutionary change. And no guesses here as the major focus was on AI technology.
However, the matter attained massive criticism and backlash as many feared how intense damage could be done to the current online ecosystem in place.
To be more specific, AI Overviews from Google were a hot topic for discussion. This has to do with generating summaries that are designed to answer queries directly related to search by simply scrapping data online.
They usually can be found at the top of the search engine’s page and that restricts users from clicking through a certain website where the material is published online.
So as one can imagine, it’s not going down too well with critics where massive protests led to legal action in Europe including France. This is where publishers are now calling for justice and ended up getting a victory in a new court battle where Google was forced to embark on negotiations.
It could not behave like a monopoly and rid people of their hard work and right to earn revenue online so a fair compensation was demanded from the Android maker by the publishers in the verdict.
The case in question was also related to how Google violated laws linked to intellectual property. It was taking on content for AI model training purposes and not attaining consent.
Meanwhile, a group of publishers was also seen emerging with another victory linked to Google repurposing so many of their snippets linked to their content without providing credit. They would now be compensated.
But it’s not just the EU that has been raising issues against Google. We’re now seeing the matter grow into a bigger issue with objections arising in places like the US where AI search overviews continue to take traffic away, in this way, it’s Google that keeps attaining profits via others’ content unjustly.
This is why the matter is highlighting the requirement for the latest frameworks that govern using data online as it’s the era of AI.
Experts claim that AI Overviews can really affect millions of people who rely on Google to get referral traffic. And if that ceases to exist with AI overviews, the matter is serious. You can think of it like plagiarism where one journalist was stealing from another’s content and hence would be held accountable.
We’ve got more lawsuits hitting OpenAI’s direction that are linked to copyright infringement due to data scrapping so that big AI models can be trained and tech giants can benefit with zero compensation given to those who are the owners of the material.
For a while now, the search engine giant’s model has been based so much on attaining traffic from various other pages and making revenue via paid advertising streams. And so many AI overviews are now launching threats to shift the entire model of revenue generation so those at a loss are everyone else but Google.
The loss that would ensue could be as much as $2 billion in revenue for creators working on this front. And that’s not all. Studies prove how some pages could go on losing up to two-thirds of the entire search traffic.
It’s not a leveled playing field by any means and Google stealing content under the name of AI Overviews is certainly not going to be appreciated without a fight as so many have already criticized this controversial move.
Image: DIW-Aigen
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