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Google faces first major legal challenge to AI summaries in search results: Here's what that means
Anytime you search for something on Google now, AI summaries or overviews show up on top, before specific results or links to sites carrying the information
Search engine Google's feature that shows brief summaries generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) illegally uses other people's journalism, thus reducing traffic to websites that create that original content, a top media company has said in its lawsuit in the US against the tech giant.
The case filed by Penske Media — owner of outlets such as Rolling Stone, Billboard and Variety — in a federal court in Washington, DC, is the first time a major American publisher has taken the Alphabet-owned Google to court over these AI-generated summaries, Reuters has reported.
What are the AI summaries?
Anytime you search for something on Google now, AI summaries show up at the top, before specific results, which means the users won't have to visit specific sites carrying the information if they get enough of a gist from the summary.
News organisations have said for months that such features reduce the tendency of users to visit the original sites. That takes away traffic, and cuts advertising and subscription revenue as a result.
What's at nub of case against new Google search feature?
The lawsuit says Google has leverage — almost 90% share of the US search market — otherwise it would have to pay publishers for the right to republish their work or use it to train its AI systems. Google thus only puts such websites on its search results list that allow use of their information for its AI summaries, alleged the lawsuit.
The petitioner, Penske, is a family-owned media conglomerate led by Jay Penske. Its content gets 120 million online visitors a month.
It says it can either block Google from indexing its content, which means removing itself from search results; or it can continue to provide training material to Google for its AI, “adding fuel to a fire that threatens [our] entire publishing business,” says the complaint, according to the Wall Street Journal.
"We have a responsibility to proactively fight for the future of digital media and preserve its integrity – all of which is threatened by Google's current actions," Jay Penske told Reuters.
Online education company Chegg also sued Google in February, alleging that the search giant's AI-generated overviews were eroding demand for original content and undermining publishers' ability to compete.
What Google has said: ‘Better user experience’
In response to Penske's lawsuit, Google has said that these AI overviews offer a better experience to users. It claimed these summaries send traffic to a wider variety of websites.
“With AI Overviews, people find Search more helpful and use it more, creating new opportunities for content to be discovered. We will defend against these meritless claims." Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda said.
Google was, not too long ago, facing possible action over its dominance of the search market as it allegedly violated US anti-trust laws. But a US judge rules that Google will not have to sell its Chrome browser as part of efforts to open up competition in search.
This essentially means publishers publishers need Google to stay in the game, and thus cannot opt out of AI overviews or summaries, critics have said.
‘Market power to not engage in healthy practices’
Voices against the dominance remain loud. Nicholas Thompson, chief executive of The Atlantic, recently said, “Google is shifting from being a search engine to an answer engine.”
Danielle Coffey, CEO of the News/Media Alliance, a trade group representing more than 2,200 US-based publishers, told Reuters on Friday: "All of the elements being negotiated with every other AI company doesn't apply to Google because they have the market power to not engage in those healthy practices,"
After facing similar scrutiny and charges of illegally using content, OpenAI has been signing deals to use content with the likes of News Corp, Financial Times and The Atlantic. Google, whose Gemini chatbot competes with ChatGPT, has been slower on such deals.
"When you have the massive scale and market power that Google has, you are not obligated to abide by the same norms. That is the problem," Coffey said.
A similar case is pending against OpenAI in India, too, filed by news agency ANI which was later joined by the Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA), members of which include The Indian Express, Hindustan Times and NDTV among others.
