We Shouldn’t Pay: Google Defends Using Free Web Content for AI Training

One has always dominated debate content ownership from the very beginning of the AI boom. In order to build their services, AI companies use large amounts of data on the internet. But for most publishers, it is unfairly disadvantaged that many publishers have been under-regular compensation and not fair compensation. Similarly, there is some controversy about Google’s position on AI training payment as it came under scrutiny during a hearing with the UK’S Lords Communications and Digital Committee in.

Public affairs executive Roxanne Carter of Google explained that the company does not think it should pay for “freely available” content used to train their AI models.

Google defends its position of not paying publishers for AI training on public data

The case is based on Google’s specific definition of how AI works. Similarly, Carter says that “AI models such as Gemini are not databases or systems for finding information.” In contrast, they search for huge quantities of information in order to identify statistical links and patterns between ideas and words. Google says the end goal is to create “wholly new content” from these patterns. But their AI is not just copying what publishers or creators have done, they say.’ ” They claim that the only way to do this is by using their own AI.

Although Google won’t pay for training on the open web, they do distinguish between general web scraping and specialized access. The firm is also actively negotiating deals for archival content and special datasets that are not available to the public. Brefly, the company will pay for “access” to data that is not on their own platform. They are not doing so to train the AI on what they think is the public domain of the internet.

Google’s AI Overviews: The opt-out dilemma

It is a more complicated situation for publishers to be . Google cites an app called “Google Extended” that allows users to remain in Google Search while opting out of having their content used to train AI models such as Gemini. On paper, this sounds like a fair compromise. But there is a large grey area still around “AI Overviews” the summaries that appear at the top of search results.

Google’s representatives were vague when asked if publishers could opt out of AI Overviews in particular. This is a way to not appear in these summaries at the time, as I use some specific tags. Sadly, adding these tags to the tag could also make it harder for people to search a site in regular searches. This gives smaller publishers an extremely hard position They may be able to let AI summarize their work (which could reduce the number of direct clicks) or risk losing their search ranking entirely.

The smaller players could be the most affected

Large media firms are a lucrative deal with tech giants, government officials fear that big media companies can make good deals with the company but smaller companies often miss out on larger deals. The s fear that AI summaries could compete with the articles they summarize. In this way, AI summaries may be relying on the work of the creator to keep people on Google search page rather than sending them back to the original source.

Regulatory bodies continue to discuss these issues with regard to . At the same time, in AI’s age, “fair use” remains a question of ultimate importance. Until now, Google maintains the firm belief that the open web is a free classroom for their AI as creators of that content claim they have ‘free’ information in place to value the AI.

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