Google’s foray into AI-generated journalism continues, potentially disrupting an already volatile media industry in the process.
adweek Google is reportedly paying a select group of publishers to secretly test a secret generative AI platform designed to create news articles. By agreement, adweek “Publishers are expected to use a suite of tools to produce a certain amount of content over a 12-month period,” in exchange for a “yearly five-figure monthly fee,” he said.
according to adweekThe beta AI tool allows “resource-strapped publishers” to “index recently published reports produced by other organizations, such as government agencies or nearby news organizations, and You can create aggregated content more efficiently by summarizing and publishing as new articles.”
In other words, it sounds like this: terrible Much like how AI programs are explicitly designed to siphon the work of other news providers and distill it into new material for publication. And they pay a lot of money to struggling publishers to promote it.
in a statement to adweek, Google claimed the initiative was still in the “early stages” and defended AI as a way to “help” news organizations, especially small publishers. But the tool is limping along as efforts to integrate AI into search algorithms regurgitate journalism and are crippled by the proliferation of low-quality AI-generated content online. It feels like it’s much less of a way to support the journalism industry. , and more like another AI-generated nail in the coffin.
according to Adweek’s According to the report, Google specifically asked publishers participating in the AI test to provide a list of government agencies and other news organizations that produce news that they believe is relevant to a particular participant’s readership. When a site on the list publishes something new, it will automatically appear in the program. The AI will paraphrase the content and “change the language and style of the report so it reads like a news article.” ad week.
Notably, the agencies and publications actually doing the work to create the source material never provided consent or were directly compensated. This is an import detail given the general lack of compensation models for journalists and publications that feature work produced by Google’s AI. General criticism of the company’s AI search efforts remains.
The tool also reportedly does not require publishers to mark content as AI-generated, meaning content created by the program may already have been published without AI disclosure. means.
But Google denied claims that its tools plagiarize the work of other journalists.
A Google spokesperson said: “Speculation that this tool is being used to republish works in other media is inaccurate.” adweek In a statement. “This experimental tool was responsibly designed to help local small publishers produce high-quality journalism using factual content from public data sources such as local government communications offices and health authorities. These tools are not intended to, and cannot replace, critical data sources.”Journalists have a role to play in reporting, writing, and fact-checking stories. . ”
Again, this almost feels like lip service.Google is already have Tools like Google Alerts that can alert journalists to content relevant to their reporting. Importantly, this tool does not work by paraphrasing someone else’s publication.and based on that Adweek’s To summarize the tools, covert AI services appear to be here to stay. Sam Altman’s Creativity Reasoning, or the belief that creative human labor is essentially just an algorithmic mental remix of the creativity we have already consumed. Or, to put it simply, we’re all just doing word-and-picture calculations using data rattled and absorbed in our feeble human brains.
Adweek’s The report does not name the publication testing the product. But it’s not surprising to see Google focus on local news publishers, undoubtedly important institutions that have unfortunately been struggling for some time. But this isn’t the first time small local retailers have turned to AI as a way to avoid labor costs while producing more materials.
But if the only way forward for local journalism in a shrinking market is to actually use algorithms to churn out content at the expense of other news providers as a way to cut costs, then that’s what this institution is doing. A very depressing vision for the future.
More on AI and local news: Gannett sportswriter is ’embarrassed’ about failed AI-generated sports article
