Source: Finance Association

At Google's annual I/O developer conference on Tuesday, the tech giant unveiled a number of products and services related to artificial intelligence (AI). One of the topics is incorporating AI into its world-leading search engine. US news publishers say this will have a “disastrous” impact.

Here's the thing. Starting this week, Google's most powerful AI model, Gemini, will be injected into its search engine. Using this rapidly evolving technology, users will directly summarize search results when using the search engine. This feature is also known as “AI Overviews” (AI Overviews).

In other words, users will soon no longer need to click on news links displayed in search results to find the information they are looking for.

On the face of it, this might sound convenient, but for news publishers, it's definitely a thunderbolt from the blue; they are already facing a situation where traffic continues to drop. After Google launches AI Overview, it may cause the audience to shrink further, causing them to lose traffic and revenue.

After Google sent a clear signal, the news industry began to sound the alarm. Danielle Coffey, general counsel for the News Media Alliance, stated bluntly: “This will have a disastrous impact on our traffic, as Google's technological innovations to further meet users' search needs will result in fewer users clicking on our links, thereby further reducing our chances of profiting from our content.”

Coffey's organization represents more than 2,000 news publishers and has taken an aggressive stance on AI developers' use of news. Coffey added, “We'll get even less traffic in the future, and Google has a dominant search engine that strengthens its market power, and we once again have to abide by their terms. This time, they launched a product that directly competes with our content and uses our content to drive it. This is a distortion of 'innovation'.”

Confrontation or cooperation?

At the same time, other tech companies are also preparing to launch their own AI search engines, which also means that the news industry will suffer a series of brutal blows.

Since ChatGPT appeared, it showed the public the potential power of AI and sparked an arms race with Google, Meta, and others, and news publishers have been very worried that this technology will eventually have an impact on their business.

Now, that concern has finally come true. Second, given how rapidly this transformative technology is evolving, news publishers have little time to plan how to deal with it.

Some news organizations have chosen to carefully partner with tech giants. For example, OpenAI signed content licensing agreements with digital media companies such as dotDash Meredith and the Financial Times.

However, there are also options for confrontation. At the end of last month, eight US news agencies filed lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft in the New York federal court, accusing these two companies of using their news works to train generative AI without permission. Additionally, “The New York Times” and three other news organizations, The Intercept, Raw Story, and Alternet, have also initiated similar lawsuits against Microsoft and OpenAI.

Although news publishers used to work with big tech companies, the relationship between them has seriously deteriorated in recent years.

On Tuesday, Google argued that AI changes would actually benefit news companies, but this may be predicting that its statement would cause panic. Google said, “We found that the links included in the AI Overview received more hits than traditional web listings. As we expand this experience, we will continue to focus on delivering valuable traffic to publishers and creators.”

But given the past record between Silicon Valley and news publishers, this statement is unlikely to be a relief, and some have already expressed doubts about Google's claims.

Edit/evans