CHECKMATE Quote The rise of AI is the latest and most anxiety-inducing chapter in the long, uneasy marriage between Google and publishers, which have been bou

CHECKMATE Quote The rise of AI is the latest and most anxiety-inducing chapter in the long, uneasy marriage between Google and publishers, which have been bound to each other through a basic transaction: Google helps publishers be found by readers, and publishers give Google information—millions of pages of web content—to make its search engine useful. Google’s embrace of AI in search threatens to throw off that delicate equilibrium, publishing executives say, by dramatically increasing the risk that users’ searches won’t result in them clicking on links that take them to publishers’ sites. Most gallingly for publishers, Google’s AI search was trained, in part, on their content and other material from across the web—without payment. … The new search features are also a balancing act for Google, which has moved quickly to refashion its flagship product in response to the rising popularity of chatbots like ChatGPT. The changes risk damaging website owners that produce the written material vital to both Google’s search engine and its powerful AI models. “If Google kills too many publishers, it can’t build the LLM,” said digital media consultant Matthew Goldstein, who was one of the first to sound the alarm about the potential impact on publishers’ businesses. End Quote What Joe Internet User sees is that publications open the door to Google in order to get search results, and clicks on their otherwise paywalled or nagwalled sites. But doing so lets Google reuse their content, and “create” its own via AI. My opinion? Since “news” is not unique to any organization, given that events are visible to nearly everyone, and with internet users instantly flooding the zone with conspiracy theories, the element of verification and trust is weakened. Just read the unverified horror stories coming out of the Middle East regularly. So, what’s really unique to news organizations amounts to editorials and the familiar clickbait. And AI can editorialize, as well as come up with recipes, reviews and so on. Sadly, it seems that the world is in a dogfight between evil and greed. I say that evil (Google) wins because it can always train on your emails and work documents in order to be timely when all others shut their doors (except to generate those valuable Google “hits”). (Outside the quote, this is opinion and highly speculative) But someone is training their AI on it. It might show up … who knows where?