Google Wants to Recruit News Outlets for AI Licensing Project

Google reportedly wants to recruit news companies for an AI-related licensing project.

The tech giant hopes to launch a pilot project with around 20 national news organizations, Bloomberg News reported Tuesday (July 22), citing sources familiar with the matter.

“We’ve said that we’re exploring and experimenting with new types of partnerships and product experiences, but we aren’t sharing details about specific plans or conversations at this time,” a Google spokesperson told Bloomberg.

The report contends that getting Google to pay for content for its artificial intelligence (AI) efforts could mark a victory for media companies amid falling readership and ad revenues.

Aside from partnerships with the Associated Press and Reddit, Bloomberg adds, Google hasn’t made the same type of media deals as rivals like Perplexity and OpenAI, both of which pay publishers for their content.

One source told Bloomberg that Google’s licensing effort is designed around specific products, without sharing further details of the project.

As Bloomberg notes, Google cites articles and online publications in its AI Overviews, the brief AI-generated responses at the top of search results. Publishers argue these summarizations have reduced traffic to their sites, the report adds, though they are reluctant to hide their content from Google’s AI out of concern that they’d be less visible in search results.

The media and tech industries have for years clashed over Silicon Valley’s use of news stories to build AI programs. Some of those disputes have ended up in court, such as The New York Times’ suit against OpenAI and Microsoft.

That case is ongoing, with a judge recently ruling that OpenAI must retain consumer ChatGPT and API data indefinitely. That order was in response to a demand from the plaintiffs, who say that data may support their case. OpenAI has appealed the order, saying it conflicts with its privacy commitments.

The order came in response to a demand from The New York Times and other plaintiffs in a lawsuit they brought against the artificial intelligence (AI) company, because they believe the data might support their case, OpenAI said in a Thursday (June 5) blog post.

More recently, AI company Cohere was sued by a group of media companies for copyright infringement, alleging that the company had improperly used at least 4,000 copyrighted works to train its AI large language model.

A spokesperson for Cohere told PYMNTS the company stands by its training practices and prioritizes controls to lower the risk of intellectual property infringement, and called the lawsuit “misguided and frivolous.”

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