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new York
CNN
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The AI doomsday clock seems ready to strike midnight for publishers.
Google announced Tuesday that it will equip its ubiquitous search engine with its powerful artificial intelligence model, Gemini, leveraging the rapid evolution of technology to respond directly to user queries at the top of results pages. . “Google will do the Google search for you,” the company explained. In other words, users will soon no longer need to click on links displayed in search results to find the information they are looking for.
On the surface, this may seem convenient, but for news publishers – many of whom are already struggling with a steep drop in traffic – the redesigned search experience will likely lead to an even bigger uptick. further decreasing audience, potentially depriving them of readers and revenue. Why spend time clicking on a link when Google has already searched the Internet and collected the relevant information with its AI?
“Google will take care of the arrangements,” the executives said. But much of this work, of course, takes the form of human-written articles and expert opinions published on the Internet on blogs and media outlets, all based on an advertising medium.
Google’s message was heard loud and clear. Within hours of Mountain View’s announcement, the news industry began sounding the alarm.
“This will be catastrophic for our traffic, as marketed by Google to further satisfy user queries, leaving even less incentive to click for us to monetize our content,” Danielle Coffey, CEO of News/, said bluntly. Media Alliance. CNN.
Coffey, whose organization represents more than 2,000 news publishers and has taken an aggressive stance toward AI developers’ use of journalism, added: “What little traffic we get today will be further reduced , and with a dominant search engine consolidating its market power, we must once again respect their terms. This time, with a product that directly competes with our content, using our content to power it. This is a perverse twist on “innovation.”
Google’s announcement, which newsrooms have been expecting and worrying about in public and private forums in recent months, is poised to further hit an industry that has suffered a series of brutal blows – much of it in the hands of Big Tech – during the last years. This also comes as OpenAI is reportedly preparing to launch its own AI-powered search engine.
Since ChatGPT burst onto the scene over a year ago, demonstrating the potential power of AI to audiences and sparking an arms race with Google, Meta and others, publishers have been very concerned about the impact that technology will ultimately have on their businesses. But they have had little time to plan their responses to this transformative technology, given the breakneck pace at which it has developed.
Some newsrooms have chosen to cautiously ally themselves with tech giants, striking deals with OpenAI to license their deep archives of content. Others have taken a very different path, with the New York Times notably taking legal action against the creator of ChatGPT.
While publishers once worked hand-in-hand with big tech companies (remember those days?), their relationship has deteriorated dramatically in recent years. Mark Zuckerberg has most publicly turned his back on the news industry, reducing the priority of news articles on his platforms and ending other initiatives once championed by his company. Google has maintained better relationships with publishers but has also faced heavy criticism. More recently, he attracted contempt after temporarily blocking some California media outlets from search results in response to a proposed law that would require it to pay publishers.
On Tuesday, likely predicting the panic its announcement would generate, Google argued that changes to AI would actually benefit news companies. Google told CNN that it was showing more links with its AI Overviews feature and that by improving the search product, it would allow the company to send more traffic to web publishers.
“We see that links included in AI previews generate more clicks than if the page had appeared as a traditional web listing for that query,” Google said in its announcement. “As we expand this experience, we will continue to focus on sending valuable traffic to publishers and creators.”
But given Silicon Valley’s track record with publishers, this statement is unlikely to bring them much relief. And already, Google’s claims are arousing skepticism.
“Our initial analysis suggests that this will significantly reduce search traffic to content creators’ websites, which will have a direct impact on their advertising revenue and, by extension, their livelihoods,” Marc McCollum, director of the innovation at Raptive, which provides services to thousands of creators and businesses alone. , said in a statement. “This change could endanger the future of the open Internet. »
