Google is reportedly pursuing AI licensing deals with publishers

Google would have spoken to publishers for AI license agreements, because the relationship between the media and the AI industries becomes controversial.

According to BloombergGoogle would have prepared itself to launch an “initially pilot project with approximately 20 national media”, where participants would dismiss their content for Google’s IA tools. There are not many details beyond the initial report, but it looks like the strategy that Optaai has used. In recent years, Openai has concluded license agreements with major publishers like Hearst, Condé Nast, Vox Media, The Atlanticand News Corp. Perplexity is second in the number of agreements negotiated with publishers.

In the middle of this backdrop, several publishers report that AI tools like Chatgpt, Google AI, the previews and Google AI mode led to the fall in traffic. A report of Wall Street Journal Recently described the situation as “AI Armageddon” for online news publishers, who, according to them, were “crushed” by the Google IA search tools. A recent article in The Economist was even more blunt. During an illustration of a tombstone, the magazine wrote: “AI kills the web.”

Google already has an AI license partnership with the Associated Press to offer real -time news updates with its Gemini model. He also has a license agreement of $ 60 million with Reddit. But this reported pilot would be a significant expansion of this strategy. “We have said that we explore and experience new types of partnerships and product experiences, but we do not share details on specific plans or conversations,” said a Google spokesperson.

Media companies are faced with a difficult choice: to fight IA companies or join them

The world of publishing is divided on how to navigate the use of their content for the formation of AI models. The robots of AI companies scratch all the internet corners for valuable training data, which is transmitted to large language models (LLM) to shape the chatbot responses.

Some publishers and authors have accused copyright violation companies for the use of this content without authorization or compensation. The New York Times is currently in the middle of a trial with Openai and Microsoft for this reason, one of the many prosecutions of this type. (The parent company of Mashable, Ziff Davis, also continues Openai for copyright violation.)

Other publishers have adopted the opposite approach, agreeing to dismiss their content, citing new ways for readers to discover their stories. Although the license conditions with OpenAi was not publicly disclosed, the publisher Dotdash Meredith would have received $ 16 million a year, while information report indicated that some publishers only receive $ 1 million per year.

The affirmations of technological companies according to which the use of scraped content is protected by the legal doctrine of fair use remain undecided in the eyes of the law. Although Anthropic and Meta recently won cases against the authors with the Fair Use argument, a pre-publication version of a highly anticipated AI report from the American copyright office has generally favored copyright holders with AI training. Although the courts were deliberating on specific fair fair use cases, the growing AI licenses market is perhaps a sign of recognition that technological companies need to play well with publishers in exchange for high quality data.

Meanwhile, the introduction by Google of summaries generated by the AI and the IA mode continues to advance outgoing traffic, according to many accounts of the publishers. Instead of clicking on the sites from the results of Google search, users receive information on Google AI models on the search page. On a page on the Google AI site, the company says that it “engages with the ecosystem to explore new types of partnership and value exchange models”.

While the arrow generating AI increases the landscape of digital media, Google could have a huge influence on the future of online edition.

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April, filed a complaint against Openai, alleging that it has violated Ziff Davis Copyrights in the training and exploitation of its AI systems.