Google is paying small publishers to use its AI platform to rewrite content published on news sites targeted by Google’s platform for large-scale content parasitism. People on Twitter are expressing unfavorable opinions about it.
Google is paying small independent publishers to use a generative AI platform that targets content from other news content for summarization and reposting. According to a paywall article published on AdWeekthe tool is a beta test that requires publishers to publish a required number of articles per day to get paid.
Small publishers use a tool that shows them content chosen by the AI tool that can be selected to produce “free” content.
Why Google’s new tool is problematic
It is common for one news organization to pick up news that is broken by another news organization and, if done by a capable reporter, put their own spin on it. It’s how things are done.
However, Google’s tool appears to resemble a programmatic way of plagiarizing content called article rotation. Article spinning is an automated tactic that uses website feeds to feed in published content from other sites that the computer program then rewrites, usually replacing words with synonyms. However, AI can generate more nuanced content, essentially summarizing content in a different tone by replacing entire sentences and paragraphs with content that is the same as the original but expressed in a different way.
What’s different is that this tool is something that Google is testing, and this is problematic not only because Google is the de facto gatekeeper of online content, but because the tool targets specific news organizations because the its content is produced by small independent publishers.
On the one hand, this could be a good thing because it could generate inbound links to the original publisher of the news. Free links, that’s a win-win, right?
But it’s not because news publishers don’t really benefit from links to content that has a shelf life of about 48 hours, at most. News is a hamster wheel of constant news release serving to keep the wheel turning to keep the business afloat. It is an uninterrupted process that can easily be undermined by wholesale dilution of content.
And that’s really the problem with Google’s AI tool, because it dilutes the value an organization creates by hiring professionals to create the “value-added” content that Google often says it wants to publish. And that’s what makes Google’s AI tool hypocritical at best and cynical at worst because Google encourages the creation of high-quality content while undermining it.
An army of publishers programmatically copying every published news article doesn’t look so good for the original publisher, especially if their content is swamped by Google News’ parasitic AI, in search results and the user’s preference for their local online news publisher that is publishing news from major publishers.
Reaction to Google’s AI News Tool
Tech journalist Brian Merchant (who writes for The Atlantic and has published a book) posted a virtual thumbs-down on Twitter, a sentiment that was unanimously seconded.
he he tweeted:
“The Nightmare Begins: Google Is Incentivizing AI-Generated Scaling Production.
If you are a news outlet that has agreed to this paltry arrangement, and especially if you publish AI-generated articles without disclaimers, you should be deeply ashamed of yourself.
Brian followed through with it tweet with your observation About Google’s AI Tool for Small News Sites:
“If we in the media have learned ANYTHING from the last 10 years, it’s that we don’t really have to settle for the junk that big tech throws at us, and it will, in fact, screw us up in the end: why would you participate in the automation?is your field gone for $30,000 a year???
The merchant retweeted a comment by tech journalist Alex Kantrow:
“This is sad. Is this the web Google wants?”
another person he tweeted:
“It’s all about uncontrolled, untaxed profits.
Of course, that’s what Google wants: corporations selling out their employees and Americans in general for a quick buck.”
A person who works for Microsoft invoked the concept of “autophagy” which is when an organism begins to consume itself, like when it starves.
she he tweeted:
“The quality of news content will decrease and hurt search. Autophagy is a real threat to the quality of information, and no one seems to be taking it seriously.”
The future of content
This isn’t just a “news” problem, it’s a problem for everyone who makes a living publishing content online. What can be used for news posts can easily be adapted for product reviews, recipes, entertainment, and pretty much any topic that affiliates post content on.
What do you think of the new Google tool? Will it help small publishers compete against the bigger sites or is it just the beginning of autophagy in the body of online publishing?
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