A gaggle of Democratic senators has called on the FTC and DOJ to analyze whether latest generative AI features reminiscent of summaries on search platforms violate U.S. antitrust law.
New features like Google's AI Overviews and Search GPT are objectively useful for quickly providing answers to user questions, but at what cost? The senators, led by Senator Amy Klobuchar, say generative AI's ability to summarize or regurgitate existing content is hurting content creators and journalists.
Your letter A letter addressed to the FTC and DOJ states: “Recently, several dominant online platforms have introduced latest generative AI features that answer user queries by aggregating, or in some cases simply reproducing, online content from other sources or platforms. The introduction of those latest generative AI features further threatens the power of journalists and other content creators to receive compensation for his or her essential work.”
Generative AI poses latest risks for content creators, especially journalists. With local news already in crisis, I called on the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Trade Commission to analyze whether generative AI products threaten fair competition and innovation by repackaging original content without permission. pic.twitter.com/Jo1KdA45H1
– Senator Amy Klobuchar (@SenAmyKlobuchar) 10 September 2024
They argue that search platforms used to direct users to relevant web sites where content creators benefited from website traffic, but now their content is refactored or aggregated by AI without rewarding the one that created it.
The letter states: “When a generative AI feature answers a question directly, it often forces the content creator – whose content has been relegated to a lower position within the user interface – to compete with content generated from their very own work.”
While platforms like Google respect the instruction within the Robots.txt file to not index a content creator's website, this ends in the location not appearing in any respect in searches.
Journalism in peril
The senators claim: “Dominant online platforms in areas reminiscent of search, social media, e-commerce, operating systems, and app stores are already abusing their power as gatekeepers over the digital marketplace in ways in which harm small businesses and content creators and deprive consumers of selection.”
They claim that AI could make the situation worse and have “potentially devastating effects” on news organizations and other content creators.
In January, Senator Klobuchar asked Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch if his company had a selection about whether or not to permit AI models to scrape their content. Lynch said the opt-out feature was introduced after existing models were trained and reinforces their dominance.
Lynch said: “The only thing we are able to do with that is prevent a brand new competitor from training latest models to compete with them. So, frankly, it's too late to get out of coaching.” Condé Nast has since signed a cope with OpenAI to license its data to coach its models.
Generative AI is amazingly useful, however it is disrupting the creative industry whilst it creates latest opportunities. AI is doing to online news what the web did to print media.
According to a recent study cited by the senators, some 2,900 newspapers have been lost within the United States, and by the top of 2024, a 3rd of the newspapers in existence in 2005 may have disappeared.
AI undoubtedly makes it easier and faster to get answers to our questions, but from an ever-shrinking pool of sources.
If the FTC and DOJ agree with the Senators that these generative AI features constitute a “type of exclusion or an unfair approach to competition that violates antitrust laws,” then Google, OpenAI, and others like them might want to rethink their answers to our questions.
