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Google's AI Mode is 'the definition of theft,' publishers say
- ivape 1y agoThe LLM should know when it regurgitates content from a specific site and page, that should be the new “pageview”. Me telling the LLM that I don’t want the first answer it gave me from a common site is the same as me going deep into Google search result page 10 (like the old days).
- jxjnskkzxxhx 1y ago> LLM should know when it regurgitates content from a specific site and page I dont think that's how LLMs work.
- enjoylife 1y agoMaybe some reverse attribution to determine how much credit to give different sources in the old top k results. Maybe a llm that is trained on fact finding, and giving proper % of credit. But this would probably require a collective contract in place to benefit site owners, which means its never going to happen.
- Cyclone_ 1y agoThat's what Google does now for some of its AI search results. There's a link icon next to some of the answers.
- jxjnskkzxxhx 1y agoNo, you have it backwards. What google does is have it's ai read the URLs that search found, summarize them, and tag the URL.
- ivape 1y agoYou don’t think it can run one more iteration on its own output to provide attribution? They could even create a synthetic page view for the sources with an exclusive bot and not change anything about how things are done (the bot is told to visit the site registering a page view).
- jxjnskkzxxhx 1y ago> You don’t think it can run one more iteration on its own output to provide attribution Please explain to me how an algorithm that takes a sequence of tokens and outputs a URL would work.
- jmathai 1y agoIs there much material difference to publishers to opt out of AI Mode given how much of the distribution Google controls? I understand it prevents publishers' works from being "stolen" but leaves them without a major distribution source.
- tippytippytango 1y agoThere will have to be a new IP framework to make sure people are properly incentivized to produce content in an AI first world.
- zb3 1y agoThe "traffic" did not incentivize "publishers" (as they call themselves) to produce any valuable content.. instead, it incentivized them to produce SEO garbage that's not helpful and often deceptive.
- kixiQu 1y agoI think it's worth being thoughtful about the whole range of folks doing a whole range of stuff out on the Internet. I like this piece about the various incentives that exist: https://vbuckenham.com/blog/how-to-find-things-online/ https://vbuckenham.com/blog/how-to-find-things-online/
- zb3 1y agoI don't know how your comment addresses my comment and the article you mentioned is long. But since you replied, you know what you meant, so could you share your particular argument?
- kixiQu 1y agoI think connecting this to what V expressed is the value I meant to add here, I think they expressed what they meant with the detail required to express it, and I'm not interested in engaging with the topic on a level that works from summaries alone. Suffice to say that you responded to a comment speaking of how "people are properly incentivized to produce content" by saying '"traffic" did not incentivize "publishers" (as they call themselves) to produce any valuable content' as though traffic didn't have to do with the people out there publishing valuable stuff on the internet today, or as though such people don't exist. V's thing considers the interaction among these people, their incentives, and LLMs.
- josefritzishere 1y agoGoogle is really making a good case that they're abusing their monopoly positino and need trust busting.
- dieortin 1y agoIs there a difference from what Google is doing here and what other players (OpenAI, Perplexity, Phind…) are doing?
- Unroasted6154 1y agoGoogle will give them more money if they win the lawsuit.
- jxjnskkzxxhx 1y agoMaybe off topic, but Ive always found strange people who comment on Google's monopoly by focusing on chrome. It seems obvious to me that the key to their dominance is that they both have control over how traffic is distributed to websites, and how those websites get paid for the traffic they get. Chrome and android are just nice to haves, but Google would still be a monopoly without them. I think if you wanna break up Google it would be a lot more effective to separate search from AdSense, rather than chrome.
- empath75 1y agoAlso Chrome is basically useless as a money-making product without the google integrations. There's no way to monetize it without search and ad integrations.
- acchow 1y agoApple gets paid $20 billion per year to set Google as the default search engine in Safari...
- azemetre 1y agoYeah and if you’re going by market share that easily puts Chrome in the $100billion range. Obviously there are massive profits to be made from private browsers.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- owebmaster 1y ago50million chromeOS new devices are sold and added to its userbase. Chrome as a company could be huge and compete against Windows, Mac, iOS and Android.
- EE84M3i 1y agoGoogle sells chrome(os) directly as a product to enterprises and schools for fleet management and addon functions. Its currently part of google workspace but could be separated out. Is going to print money like google ads? Probably not. Could it sustain the browser as a standalone business? Perhaps.
- zb3 1y agoVery good. Google created this SEO garbage so now they can (and should) put an end to it.
- puppycodes 1y agoharm to the publishing industry is the worlds tiniest violin and biggest eyeroll. google is evil in much bigger ways than this. Fix the insanity that is intellectual property and get back to us.
- rvnx 1y agoElevator Operators (people who were driving elevators up and down) also got their job "stolen" by AI. Was it the responsibility of the people who created automated, cheaper and better elevators to defend the job of these obsolete people ? Not really.
- freetanga 1y agoThe big question is whether Google followed the content licensing, and if needed, paid for it.
- rvnx 1y agoI'm sure they did not, but the rich guys win, even if they do something truly illegal. If they would have respected the laws, OpenAI would not have been able to create AI models at all (as they are derivatives of copyrighted works). So it's pure piracy of content at scale. The same with Veo3. Is it beneficial to humanity ? Probably yes. Is it harmful to content creators ? Absolutely but in the long-term, they have little chances to survive, no matter if legal or not, because this is both what the market and consumers want. For example, these people on Fiverr selling blog posts, it was minimum 200 USD per blog post, and few days of turnaround. Now with AI it's 0.01 USD and instant.
- birken 1y agoIt is difficult to say this is what consumers want, when right now consumers are getting the best of both worlds: The ease of AI agents without the long-term negative consequences of destroying the publishers who created all the high quality training data in the first place. I think in the long term the highest quality content creators are going to find ways to keep their information out of AI training data, and put it behind walled gardens.
- Gud 1y agoThey could have stuck to works that are in public domain.
- mistrial9 1y ago
- j_timberlake 1y agoIt's definitely not fair, but publishers were already driving away users with screens full of ads, newsletter pop ups, "affiliate" links, and padded-out content (so people scroll more and see more ads). Users aren't going to shed any tears for them.
- wapeoifjaweofji 1y agoThe AI results are also going to be filled with that kind of trash if they aren't already.
- j_timberlake 1y agoPeople have been claiming AI text will be filled with ads since long before ChatGPT, and I'm sure they'll continue to await it for years to come.
- wapeoifjaweofji 1y agoIndeed, even the OpenAI CFO continues to actively await them. > Sarah Friar, chief financial officer at OpenAI, told the Financial Times in an interview that the $150bn AI start-up was weighing up an ads model, adding that it planned to be “thoughtful about when and where we implement them [ads]”. https://www.ft.com/content/9350d075-1658-4d3c-8bc9-b9b3dfc29b26 https://www.ft.com/content/9350d075-1658-4d3c-8bc9-b9b3dfc29... https://archive.ph/GlE3F https://archive.ph/GlE3F
- stranded22 1y agoWhen the quality content continues to disappear, then they will care - and it will be too late. We’re talking Future Publishing or even NYT here…
- j_timberlake 1y agoNYT dying because of moderate changes to Google search is a gigantic slippery-slope argument, and would be such a slow process that there'd be plenty of time to pivot anyway.
- constantcrying 1y agoIP is such a stupid concept. Both humans and AI use material to improve themselves and that material is often heavily gatekept (Try getting access to a "regular" scientific paper) and should be freely accessible to anyone. No matter who.
- Quinner 1y agoI tend to agree with you, but without a structure to incentivize people to produce such material, less of it will be created. If people can't pay the bills by doing research or writing, far fewer people will do it.
- Frost1x 1y agoI somewhat agree with you. At the same time, the effort involved in creating valuable IP can vary drastically from something I throw together on my phone like a paragraph of writing to a full movie production or huge investment in drug design for helping people live longer. Because of the variance in production cost and ROI for effort, vs the general ability to copy IP (just the IP, which could be loads of research that isn’t valuable without loads of capital and decades of investment into certain infrastructure e.g. TSMC), there have to be some sort of incentives to do the hard groundwork that creates valuable IP that once discovered is trivial to copy or implement, otherwise people simply won’t do it, they’ll just copy and resell and then fewer people will do the initial leg work until we’re left chasing the bottom of the barrel of the level of effort someone may invest in something they have no means of capturing return from that work and risk. And not everything can be hidden behind a web service, some IP is far more challenging to protect. So, while I tend to agree that the current implementation of IP protections is trash, I think we do need something there to encourage such work. In research we have(/had?) federal tax investment into doing such work and as a trade off, researchers get fed and live a semi comfortable or sometime decent quality of life for their efforts. I don’t have the answers to the ideal model, I know what we have isn’t great and can be improved upon in some ways, but I don’t know wha the best(TM) solution is here. I know it’s not pure unrestricted markets doing whatever they want, though.
- robertlagrant 1y ago> IP is such a stupid concept. Both humans and AI use material to improve themselves and that material is often heavily gatekept (Try getting access to a "regular" scientific paper) and should be freely accessible to anyone. No matter who. It's not a stupid concept. It exists because someone put effort in. Should we steal their effort?
- spacebanana7 1y agoIP laws will never be enforced on LLMs because they cannot be enforced on Chinese open source LLMs. Western governments would rather publishers lose some property rights than tolerate a world where their industries become dependent on Chinese LLMs. Although to be clear, they probably don’t enjoy either option.
- snackernews 1y agoWorkplace safety, environmental protection and human rights laws will never be enforced in the manufacturing industry because they cannot be enforced on the Chinese manufacturing industry. Western governments would rather citizens lose some rights and years off their life than tolerate a world where their industries become dependent on Chinese manufacturing. ———— Western governments could make models trained on stolen IP toxic if they wanted. It may not be worth it. The trade off of model capability vs the value of IP law might be worthwhile. But western governments should show a little dignity and openly make that trade off. We don’t need to appeal to “but China”.
- spacebanana7 1y agoWestern governments were willing to give up their manufacturers sectors, or at least large parts of them, to maintain better environmental/labour laws than China. It’s not clear that was a good decision, but tariffs and similar restrictions at least provide hope of a remedy. But we can’t use tariffs on open source software.
- krapp 1y ago>Western governments were willing to give up their manufacturers sectors, or at least large parts of them, to maintain better environmental/labour laws than China. Their motivation wasn't the maintenance of better environmental and labor laws, but higher profits from exploiting China's more business friendly (less regulation, fewer labor rights) environment. Had it been economically and politically viable for Western governments to domestically enact the same environmental and labor standards as China, they would have done so. And as soon as the quality of life in China improved enough that labor there was no longer economically viable, many companies moved their outsourcing elsewhere, such as to Vietnam or Africa.
- ppsreejith 1y agoBen Thompson's latest article deals with a possible solution to this issue: https://stratechery.com/2025/the-agentic-web-and-original-sin/ https://stratechery.com/2025/the-agentic-web-and-original-si... Tl;dr* He claims ads were the original sin of the web, built for a human internet. For the coming agentic web where most browsing would be done by agents, he proposes a new protocol that has payments integrated into it. Specifically agents paying for accessing content using micropayments with stablecoins. Also interesting to note that this is one of the most submitted articles of Stratechery to HN but gained no traction. Latest submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44073241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44073241 * A summary can also be found here: https://stratechery.com/2025/the-upheaval-coming-for-the-internet-economy https://stratechery.com/2025/the-upheaval-coming-for-the-int...
- Macha 1y agoPeople have been predicting micropayments replacing ads (with differing technology implementations) for decades at this point and it's never come to fruition, so is unlikely to be taken seriously now either. Tying it to cryptocurrency just seems like it's even less likely to get your regular Joe to onboard to this scheme, so I can see why it's never gained wider interest.
- ppsreejith 1y agoThe difference here is that humans aren't the ones using the stablecoins or micropayments. Agents are. Humans will interact with agents like they currently do. Honestly, some form of digital credits work just as well here IMO (barring regulatory hurdles). No crypto necessary.