What might go wrong if anything.
According to a claim that was published in Adweek, Google has been covertly negotiating partnerships with a few publications to deploy new generative artificial intelligence techniques in order to produce content. According to reports, the partnerships, which are purportedly worth tens of thousands of dollars annually, are a part of the Google News Initiative (GNI), which is a program that has been running for six years and provides funding for media literacy projects, fact-checking tools, and other resources for newsrooms. Moving into generative AI publishing tools, on the other hand, would be a new step for the corporation, and it is sure to be met with some level of controversy.
It has been reported by Adweek that the program is now focusing on a “handful” of smaller publications or publishers. Adweek states that the beta tools enable under-resourced publications to develop aggregated material in a more efficient manner. This is accomplished by indexing previously published reports that were made by other organizations, such as government agencies and adjacent news sites, and then summarizing and posting these reports as a new piece.
It is not entirely apparent how much payments are being made to publishers as a result of the deal; however, Adweek reports that the amount is a “five-figure sum” per year. It has been stated that in exchange, media organizations have agreed to publish a minimum of three articles per day, one newsletter per week, and one marketing campaign per month using the technologies.
Please take note that it appears that publishers participating in the scheme are not required to disclose their usage of artificial intelligence, nor are the websites that are aggregated told that their content is being used to create stories that are written by AI on other websites. It has been reported that the copy that is generated by AI makes use of a color-coded system to show the confidence level of each portion of text in order to assist human editors in reviewing the content prior to its publication.
In response to a request for comment, Google did not immediately provide a response. The organization stated in a statement that it was “in the early stages of exploring ideas to potentially provide AI-enabled tools to assist journalists with their work.” Adweek was the publication that received the statement. For further clarification, the spokesman stated that the artificial intelligence technologies “are not intended to, and cannot replace the essential role that journalists have in reporting, creating, and fact-checking their articles.”
It is not entirely obvious what Google is receiving out of the arrangement; but, it would not be the first technology company to pay newsrooms to utilize its own tools. Several parallels can be drawn between this arrangement and the agreements that Facebook had previously made with publishers in 2016 for the production of live video content. As a result of the social media business’s decision to pay publishers millions of dollars to boost its fledgling video platform, dozens of media sites decided to “pivot to video.” This decision caused the company to garner substantial media attention.
After Facebook learned that it had made a massively inaccurate calculation of the number of views that such content was receiving, those arrangements were eventually scrapped. Almost immediately after that, the social network brought an end to its live video partnerships and has since modified its algorithm to recommend less material related to news. It is estimated that the “pivot to video” that the media business made resulted in the loss of employment for hundreds of journalists.
It is likely that the GNI experiment will raise additional attention over the use of generative AI tools by publishers, despite the fact that it looks to be considerably smaller than what Facebook did nearly a decade ago with live video. The attempt by publications such as CNET and Sports Illustrated to pass off articles produced by artificial intelligence as having been created by human staff members has been met with widespread criticism.