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Google launched a private program for a handful of independent publishers last month, providing the news organizations with beta access to an unreleased generative artificial intelligence platform in exchange for receiving analytics and feedback, according to documents seen by ADWEEK.
As part of the agreement, the publishers are expected to use the suite of tools to produce a fixed volume of content for 12 months. In return, the news outlets receive a monthly stipend amounting to a five-figure sum annually, as well as the means to produce content relevant to their readership at no cost.
“In partnership with news publishers, especially smaller publishers, we’re in the early stages of exploring ideas to potentially provide AI-enabled tools to help journalists with their work,”
“This speculation about this tool being used to re-publish other outlets’ work is inaccurate,” a Google representative said in a statement. “The experimental tool is being responsibly designed to help small, local publishers produce high quality journalism using factual content from public data sources—like a local government’s public information office or health authority. These tools are not intended to, and cannot, replace the essential role journalists have in reporting, creating and fact-checking their articles.”
The beta tools let under-resourced publishers create aggregated content more efficiently by indexing recently published reports generated by other organizations, like government agencies and neighboring news outlets, and then summarizing and publishing them as a new article.
Other gen AI experiments Google has released over the past two years include the codenamed Genesis, which can reportedly produce whole news articles and was privately demonstrated to several publishers last summer, according to The New York Times. Others, including Search Generative Experience and Gemini, are available for public use and threaten to upend many of the commercial foundations of digital publishing.
The program is part of the Google News Initiative, which launched in 2018 to provide publishers with technology and training.
Although many of its programs indisputably benefit the publishers involved, the broader reception of GNI has been mixed.
Google has used GNI to drum up positive press and industry goodwill during moments of reputational duress, and many of the commercial problems it aims to solve for publishers were created by Google in the first place, said Digital Content Next CEO Jason Kint.
“The larger point here is that Google is in legislative activity and antitrust enforcement globally for extracting revenue from the publishing world,” Kint said. “Instead of giving up some of that revenue, it’s attacking the cost side for its long-tail members with the least bargaining power.”
Details of the program
Google first shared a call for news organizations to apply to test the emerging technologies in an October edition of the Local Independent Online News newsletter.
GNI began onboarding publishers in January, and the yearlong program kicked off in February.
According to the conditions of the agreement, participating publishers must use the platform to produce and publish three articles per day, one newsletter per week and one marketing campaign per month.
To produce articles, publishers first compile a list of external websites that regularly produce news and reports relevant to their readership. These sources of original material are not asked for their consent to have their content scraped or notified of their participation in the process—a potentially troubling precedent, said Kint.
When any of these indexed websites produce a new article, it appears on the platform dashboard. The publisher can then apply the gen AI tool to summarize the article, altering the language and style of the report to read like a news story.
It’s hard to argue that stealing people’s work supports the mission of the news.
Digital Content Next CEO Jason Kint
The resulting copy is underlined in different colors to indicate its potential accuracy: yellow, with language taken almost verbatim from the source material, is the most accurate, followed by blue and then red, with text that is least based on the original report.
A human editor then scans the copy for accuracy before publishing three such stories per day. The program does not require that these AI-assisted articles be labeled.
The platform cannot gather facts or information that have not already been produced elsewhere, limiting its utility for premium publishers.
Articles produced by the platform could also draw traffic away from the original sources, negatively affecting their businesses. The process resembles the ripping technique newly in use at Reach plc, except that in this case, the text is pulled from external sources.
“I think this calls into question the mission of GNI,” Kint said. “It’s hard to argue that stealing people’s work supports the mission of the news. This is not adding any new information to the mix.”
