SA fights Google's AI overviews, which steals journalists' work

The Competition Commission has ordered the US multinational to allow new publishers to opt out of having their work stolen, but also to allow them to remain on Google Search. This is a world first. By Rosa Curling

- Rosa Curling

The past one and a half decades have not been kind to the news industry.

The near total capture of advertising revenue by Big Tech has devastated newsrooms around the world, forcing papers to close or cut reporting teams to the bone.

As always, there are tough, daring and determined reporters doing their best to expose the stories that powerful people don't want us to know about. But they do so in an ever more difficult and financially precarious environment.

However, a threat has now emerged that threatens the survival of the news as it has existed for hundreds of years. Although the general source of that threat may not be novel (spoiler: it’s American Big Tech again), the specific tool is new and insidious: Google’s artificial intelligence-generated summaries.

When you now ask Google a question, the familiar list of blue links is often shoved out of sight and replaced with an autogenerated summary — Google AI Overviews (AIO).

Stealing

In news-related searches, AIO are based on reporting scraped from news pages written by human journalists. To be crystal clear: Google is in effect stealing the reporting done by professional reporters without paying them or the news publishers for which they work.

Crucially, AIO also shoves the links to the source articles from publishers down “below the fold” on the search results page, meaning that, in many cases, they simply won't be clicked through to at all.