Google’s artificial intelligence (AI)-powered search experience, AI Mode, has received a critical statement from the News/Media Alliance. On Wednesday, the US-based non-profit trade association issued an official statement criticising AI Mode, and called it “the definition of theft.” This came just a day after the Mountain View-based tech giant announced the expansion of AI Mode to all users in the US at its annual Google I/O event. As per a report, the company is also not in favour of letting publishers opt out of the AI Mode.
News Publishers Urge US DOJ to Address Their Concern
Issuing the statement, Danielle Coffey, President and CEO of the News/Media Alliance, said, “Links were the last redeeming quality of search that gave publishers traffic and revenue. Now Google just takes content by force and uses it with no return, the definition of theft.” Coffey also urged the US Department of Justice to address the association’s concerns to prevent “continued domination of the internet by one company.”
The association also expressed concerns over the fact that the AI Mode would offer users information and answers to their queries without the list of URLs that are present in the traditional Google Search. This could lead to publishers being deprived of both traffic and revenue.
Notably, the News/Media Alliance, which represents major publishers such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Condé Nast, Vox Media, and others, is a vocal critic of generative AI companies. In its AI Principles page, the association has prescribed that deployers of generative AI technologies must respect creators’ rights to their content, and that they should be transparent to publishers.
According to a Bloomberg report, Google considered a “hard red line” that would require publishers who wanted to feature in its traditional search ranking to also provide their content to train AI models. Citing an internal document revealed during Google’s antitrust trial, the publication claimed that the company had decided to “silently update” its policy about how it used publisher data with “no public announcement.”
Notably, Google continues to capture nearly 90 percent of the search market, as per a Statista report. As such, publishers cannot remove themselves from its listing without suffering major traffic and revenue hits. However, since the company has refused to let publishers have any control over their content as long as they continue to be listed, AI Mode will show the information with minimal attribution, and likely very little redirected traffic.
The News/Media Alliance highlighted this concern on its website, stating that generative AI surfaces and synthesises much more proprietary content compared to traditional search and, if unchecked, this will accelerate “the growing trend toward zero-click, reducing or even eliminating value for publishers.”