By PAUL DEEGAN
A little over a year ago, Elizabeth Reid, vice president and head of search at Google, announced, “AI Overviews will begin rolling out to everyone in the U.S., with more countries coming soon. That means that this week, hundreds of millions of users will have access to AI Overviews, and we expect to bring them to over a billion people by the end of the year.”
In making the announcement, Ms. Reid wrote, “With AI Overviews, people are visiting a greater diversity of websites for help with more complex questions. We also see that the links included in AI Overviews receive more clicks than if the page had appeared as a traditional web listing for that query. As we expand this experience, we’ll continue to focus on sending valuable traffic to publishers and creators.”
So, how is it going? Brightedge, a firm specializing in search engine optimization and content performance, released new research on the first anniversary of Google AI Overviews, which found a nearly 30 per cent reduction in click-throughs since May 2024. So much for more clicks . . . .
Large language models are harming publishers in two ways. First, AI companies are flagrantly scraping and summarizing content directly from published news articles via retrieval-augmented generation. Second, because AI overviews are significantly more comprehensive than the snippets associated with traditional links, users may feel they have no reason to click through to the source article on a publisher’s website. With the user staying within Big Tech’s increasingly tall-walled garden, rather than being directed electronically to news websites via links, publishers are deprived of audience, and their ability to sell advertising and subscriptions is significantly diminished. Yet, AI companies are selling ads against copyrighted (and often paywalled) content as well as subscriptions for their premium products.
Readers are being harmed, too. First, there are numerous examples of AI overviews serving up inaccurate, irrelevant, outdated and even harmful information. Second, if publishers cannot monetize their content, they cannot reinvest in the accurate and authoritative journalism that readers rely on to make informed decisions.
In a recent op-ed in the New York Post, Danielle Coffey, president and chief executive officer of News/media Alliance, which represents American publishers, wrote, “Big Tech’s dirty secret is that the success of its AI tools has been almost entirely built on theft.” Last November, OpenAI was sued by a group of Canadian publishers, including The Canadian Press, Torstar, The Globe and Mail, Postmedia and CBC/Radio-Canada. In February, publishers, including The Toronto Star, Condé Nast, McClatchy, Forbes, and The Guardian, sued Canadian AI company Cohere, alleging the company produced word-for-word copies of thousands of news articles without permission or compensation.
How can policymakers help scale innovation leaders while ensuring the ethical, positive and responsible use of AI? Through reasonable guardrails: First, intellectual property should be protected. Second, platforms should provide fair compensation to publishers. Third, platforms should provide clear attribution to source content. Fourth, publishers should be allowed to opt out of AI overviews without their websites being removed from search. Fifth, platforms should not discriminate in search results ranking.
In summary, to ensure our free and plural press remains commercially viable, there should be no AI crawling without consent, credit and compensation.
The writer is president and CEO of News Media Canada.
We pursue everything new – just because we can and because there is usually money to be made. For all our capacity for innovation, we are incapable of recognizing a bad idea.
Smart phones have hopelessly messed up an entire generation of young people. No one truly saw it coming and we don’t know how to put the genie back in the bottle.
mRNA gene therapy is a bad idea. This technology is extraordinarily dangerous. At present, our understanding of life – what it is and how it works – is primitive. We are in no position to mess with something so fundamental to our being and yet, here we are. All it took was a manufactured crisis to release this awful technology into the world.
AI is another bad idea. AI is quite literally the Borg, eating its way into our brains and transforming us into senseless zombies at an alarming rate.
I am not anti technology. I love planes, trains and automobiles and the freedom these technologies have given us. I love cameras, lenses and all manner of electronics. At the same time, I have come to recognize that there is something terribly wrong with our relationship to technology, not the least of which is the way in which we have handed over our power into the hands of a mad technocracy.
There was a time when I considered the Amish primitive and backward. And yet as we continue to let our cars drive us, technology to replace our careers, and AI to live surrogate lives for us, the Amish are beginning to look smarter and smarter as we become stupider and stupider.
People imagine that technology is neutral – that technologies themselves cannot be inherently good or bad – that it is all a matter of how we choose to apply it. AI proves that this is idea is not universally true. AI is a substitute for life, which it emulates and seeks to replace. AI has no redeeming qualities and there is no silver lining.