Google is engaging in discussions with news publishers to forge AI licensing deals amid escalating tensions between the media and artificial intelligence industries, according to Bloomberg.
The technology giant is preparing a “pilot project” involving approximately 20 national news outlets, which would license their content for Google’s AI tools. This initiative mirrors a strategy previously adopted by OpenAI, which has secured licensing agreements with prominent publishers such as Hearst, Condé Nast, Vox Media, The Atlantic, and News Corp.
The move comes as numerous publishers report a significant decline in traffic, attributing it to the proliferation of AI tools like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Google AI Mode. The Wall Street Journal recently characterized the situation as “AI Armageddon” for online news publishers, claiming they are being “crushed” by Google’s AI search functionalities. Similarly, The Economist starkly depicted the scenario with an illustration of a gravestone, bearing the caption, “AI is killing the web.”
Google already has an existing AI licensing partnership with The Associated Press, aimed at providing real-time news updates through its Gemini model. Furthermore, the company holds a substantial $60 million licensing deal with Reddit. The proposed pilot project with news publishers would mark a notable expansion of this strategy. A Google spokesperson stated, “We’ve said that we’re exploring and experimenting with new types of partnerships and product experiences, but we aren’t sharing details about specific plans or conversations at this time.”
Media companies are grappling with a complex decision regarding the use of their content for training AI models. AI companies extensively “scrape” the internet for valuable data to train their large language models (LLMs), which subsequently shape chatbot responses. This practice has led to a divide within the publishing world.
Some publishers and authors have accused AI companies of copyright infringement for utilizing their content without explicit permission or compensation. The New York Times, for instance, is currently embroiled in a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft over this issue. Ziff Davis, the parent company of Mashable, has also filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI.
Conversely, other publishers have opted to license their content, viewing it as a new avenue for readers to discover their stories. While the specific terms of OpenAI’s licensing deals remain undisclosed, Dotdash Meredith is reportedly receiving $16 million annually from such an agreement. However, a report from The Information suggests that some publishers are securing as little as $1 million per year.
The legal landscape surrounding the fair use doctrine, often cited by tech companies to justify the use of scraped content, remains uncertain. Although Anthropic and Meta recently prevailed in cases against authors by employing the fair use argument, a pre-publication draft of a highly anticipated AI report from the U.S. Copyright Office generally leaned in favor of copyright holders concerning AI training. As courts deliberate on specific fair use cases, the expanding AI licensing market may signal an acknowledgment that tech companies need to establish amicable relationships with publishers in exchange for high-quality data.
Meanwhile, publishers continue to report that Google’s introduction of AI-generated summaries and AI Mode is significantly throttling their outbound traffic. Instead of users clicking through to external websites from Google search results, information is now being directly provided by Google’s AI models on the search page itself. Google’s AI site indicates that the company is “engaging with the ecosystem to explore new types of partnership and value-exchange models.”
