Google is paying small publishers to use their AI platform to rewrite the content published on news sites that are targeted by Google’s platform for largescale content parasitism. People on Twitter express unfavorable opinions about it.
Google is paying small independent publishers to use a generative AI platform that targets the content of other news content for summarization and republication. According to a paywalled article published on AdWeek, the tool is a beta test that requires the publishers to post a required number of articles per day in order to receive their payment.
Small publishers use a tool that shows them content chosen by the AI tool that can be selected in order to produce content at “at no cost.”
Why Google’s New Tool Is Problematic
It’s common for a news organization to pick up on news that’s broken by another news organization and if it’s done by a capable journalist they put their own spin on it. It’s the way things are done.
Google’s tool however appears to resemble a programmatic way to plagiarize content called article spinning. Article spinning is an automated tactic that uses website feeds to input published content from other sites that is then rewritten by the computer program, typically by replacing words with synonyms. AI however can spin content with greater nuance, essentially summarizing the content in a different tone by replacing entire sentences and paragraphs with content that’s the same as the original but expressed in a different manner.
What’s different is that this tool is something that Google itself is testing and that’s problematic not just because Google is the de facto gatekeeper for online content, the tool places a target on specific news organizations to have their content spun by small independent publishers.
On the one hand that could be a good thing because it could generate inbound links to the original publisher of the news. Free links, that’s a win-win, right?
But it’s not because news publishers don’t really benefit from links to content that has a shelf life of roughly 48 hours, at most. News is a hamster wheel of constant news publication in the service of keeping the wheel spinning to keep the business afloat. It’s a nonstop process that can easily be undermined by wholesale content dilution.
And that’s really at the hear of the problem with Google’s AI tool in that it dilutes the value that an organization creates by hiring professionals to create the “value add” content that Google frequently says it wants to publish. And that is what makes Google’s AI tool hypocritical at best and cynical at worst because Google is encouraging the creation of high quality content while simultaneously undermining it.