Google has reportedly been quietly striking deals with some publishers to use new generative artificial intelligence tools to publish stories. adweek. The deals, reportedly worth tens of thousands of dollars a year, are apparently part of the Google News Initiative (GNI), a six-year-old program that provides funding and other resources to newsrooms. But for the company, a foray into generative AI publishing tools would be a new and potentially controversial step.
according to adweek, the program is currently targeting “a handful” of smaller publishers. “Beta tool lets under-resourced publishers create syndicated content more efficiently by indexing recent reports published by other organizations, such as government agencies and neighboring news outlets, then aggregating them and publishing them as new articles,” Adweek Report.
However, it is unclear how much was paid to publishers under the arrangement adweek Says it’s a “five-figure amount” per year. In exchange, media organizations reportedly agreed to use the tools to publish at least three articles per day, a weekly newsletter and a monthly marketing campaign.
Notably, publishers in the scheme are apparently not required to disclose their use of AI, nor are aggregation sites informed that their content is used to create AI-written stories on other sites. The AI-generated copy reportedly uses a color-coding system to indicate the reliability of each part of the text to help human editors review content before publishing.
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.in a statement adweek The company said it is “in the early stages of exploring ideas to provide artificial intelligence tools to help journalists do their work.” The spokesperson added that artificial intelligence tools are “not intended to, and cannot, replace journalists’ reporting, creation and fact-checking.” important role.”
It’s unclear what Google will get from the arrangement, although it’s not the first tech company to pay newsrooms to use proprietary tools. The arrangement bears some similarities to deals Facebook struck with publishers in 2016 to create live video content. The social media company made headlines for paying publishers to power its nascent video platform, with dozens of media organizations choosing to “pivot to video” as a result.
Those deals later disappeared after Facebook discovered it owned the views of such content. The social network quickly launched live video and tweaked its algorithms to recommend less news content. It is estimated that the media industry’s “pivot to video” has resulted in hundreds of journalists losing their jobs.
While the GNI project appears to be much smaller than Facebook’s attempt at live video nearly a decade ago, it could spark new scrutiny of publishers’ use of generative artificial intelligence tools.Publications such as and It has been widely criticized for trying to pass off articles written by artificial intelligence as articles written by human employees.
