“The larger point here is that Google is in legislative activity and antitrust enforcement globally for extracting revenue from the publishing world,” Kint said. “Instead of giving up some of that revenue, it’s attacking the cost side for its long-tail members with the least bargaining power.”
Details of the program
Google first shared a call for news organizations to apply to test the emerging technologies in an October edition of the Local Independent Online News newsletter.
GNI began onboarding publishers in January, and the yearlong program kicked off in February.
According to the conditions of the agreement, participating publishers must use the platform to produce and publish three articles per day, one newsletter per week and one marketing campaign per month.
To produce articles, publishers first compile a list of external websites that regularly produce news and reports relevant to their readership. These sources of original material are not asked for their consent to have their content scraped or notified of their participation in the process—a potentially troubling precedent, said Kint.
When any of these indexed websites produce a new article, it appears on the platform dashboard. The publisher can then apply the gen AI tool to summarize the article, altering the language and style of the report to read like a news story.
It’s hard to argue that stealing people’s work supports the mission of the news.
Digital Content Next CEO Jason Kint
The resulting copy is underlined in different colors to indicate its potential accuracy: yellow, with language taken almost verbatim from the source material, is the most accurate, followed by blue and then red, with text that is least based on the original report.
A human editor then scans the copy for accuracy before publishing three such stories per day. The program does not require that these AI-assisted articles be labeled.
The platform cannot gather facts or information that have not already been produced elsewhere, limiting its utility for premium publishers.
Articles produced by the platform could also draw traffic away from the original sources, negatively affecting their businesses. The process resembles the ripping technique newly in use at Reach plc, except that in this case, the text is pulled from external sources.
“I think this calls into question the mission of GNI,” Kint said. “It’s hard to argue that stealing people’s work supports the mission of the news. This is not adding any new information to the mix.”
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