Google faces new criticism after a report indicated that it has started linking its financial payments to publishers to their consent to use their content to train artificial intelligence models.

According to a report published by The Information, Google is gradually phasing out the Google News Showcase program and replacing it with a new initiative called the News AI Pilot Program, which relies on displaying publishers' content within the AI Overviews feature that provides AI-powered summaries at the top of search results.

Licensing fees for training data

Over the past years, Google has been paying publishers annual fixed fees for displaying their content within the Google News Showcase program.

But according to the report, the company has informed several media organizations that the current program will be gradually canceled, and that their continued receipt of these payments will be conditional on agreeing to new terms that grant Google broader rights to use their journalistic archives to train AI models, as reported by androidheadlines and seen by Al Arabiya Business.

Reports indicate that organizations that reject these terms will continue to receive their current dues only until the News Showcase program officially ends, after which these payments will stop.

European participation in the first phase

The first phase of the program includes several European media organizations, including The Guardian (UK), El País (Spain), and Der Spiegel (Germany).

Google emphasizes that the new program aims to explore new ways to enhance user engagement with news content through AI-powered search results.

Objections from the media sector

This approach has sparked objections from representatives of the media sector, who believe that publishers are facing a difficult choice: either allow their content to be used for training AI models, or lose an important source of revenue.

These developments come at a time when media organizations are already suffering a significant decline in traffic from search engines, following Google's expansion of AI Overviews.

Independent data indicate that some news websites have recorded a drop in traffic ranging between 30% and 40% over the past year, due to users being satisfied with reading the summaries displayed by the search engine without visiting the original source.

Concerns over exploiting dominance

Representatives of media organizations, including Digital Content Next, believe that Google's dominance in the global search market reduces publishers' ability to negotiate, as rejecting the new terms could lead to a decline in their content's visibility in search results, which could negatively impact advertising revenue and digital subscriptions.

Google has not yet issued an official comment on the report's findings, while the debate highlights the growing challenges facing the relationship between AI companies and media organizations, as the former seek high-quality data to train their models, while publishers fear losing control over their content and revenue sources.

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