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Google's AI Mode is 'the definition of theft,' publishers say

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21–30 of 65 posts

Re: Google's AI Mode is 'the definition of theft,' publishers say

#22
IP laws will never be enforced on LLMs because they cannot be enforced on Chinese open source LLMs.

Western governments would rather publishers lose some property rights than tolerate a world where their industries become dependent on Chinese LLMs. Although to be clear, they probably don’t enjoy either option.

Re: Google's AI Mode is 'the definition of theft,' publishers say

#23

Maybe off topic, but Ive always found strange people who comment on Google's monopoly by focusing on chrome. It seems obvious to me that the key to their dominance is that they both have control over how traffic is distributed to websites, and how those websites get paid for the traffic they get. Chrome and android are just nice to haves, but Google would still be a monopoly without them. I think if you wanna break u…

So does x, so does youtube, so does tiktok, so does instagram. It's not unique for an app to control both discovery and monetization of content within it.

Re: Google's AI Mode is 'the definition of theft,' publishers say

#24
post #14

Elevator Operators (people who were driving elevators up and down) also got their job "stolen" by AI. Was it the responsibility of the people who created automated, cheaper and better elevators to defend the job of these obsolete people ? Not really.

What a weird analogy.

The content and services provided by AI still needs those humans behind. Maybe when it’s all AI agents talking to themselves, this would make sense, but before that, someone has to write, edit and choose that content.

How can you say publishers are obsolete ?

Re: Google's AI Mode is 'the definition of theft,' publishers say

#25

IP is such a stupid concept. Both humans and AI use material to improve themselves and that material is often heavily gatekept (Try getting access to a "regular" scientific paper) and should be freely accessible to anyone. No matter who.

I tend to agree with you, but without a structure to incentivize people to produce such material, less of it will be created. If people can't pay the bills by doing research or writing, far fewer people will do it.

Re: Google's AI Mode is 'the definition of theft,' publishers say

#26
post #14

Elevator Operators (people who were driving elevators up and down) also got their job "stolen" by AI. Was it the responsibility of the people who created automated, cheaper and better elevators to defend the job of these obsolete people ? Not really.

Then let's get rid of all IP. I am sure Google is happy ripping other people's contents but they will vigorously defend their own IP. I also wouldn't call content creators "obsolete". AI would have nothing to train on without them.

Re: Google's AI Mode is 'the definition of theft,' publishers say

#27
post #2

The LLM should know when it regurgitates content from a specific site and page, that should be the new “pageview”. Me telling the LLM that I don’t want the first answer it gave me from a common site is the same as me going deep into Google search result page 10 (like the old days).

> LLM should know when it regurgitates content from a specific site and page I dont think that's how LLMs work.

That's what Google does now for some of its AI search results. There's a link icon next to some of the answers.

Re: Google's AI Mode is 'the definition of theft,' publishers say

#28

Maybe off topic, but Ive always found strange people who comment on Google's monopoly by focusing on chrome. It seems obvious to me that the key to their dominance is that they both have control over how traffic is distributed to websites, and how those websites get paid for the traffic they get. Chrome and android are just nice to haves, but Google would still be a monopoly without them. I think if you wanna break u…

Also Chrome is basically useless as a money-making product without the google integrations. There's no way to monetize it without search and ad integrations.

50million chromeOS new devices are sold and added to its userbase. Chrome as a company could be huge and compete against Windows, Mac, iOS and Android.

Re: Google's AI Mode is 'the definition of theft,' publishers say

#29

IP is such a stupid concept. Both humans and AI use material to improve themselves and that material is often heavily gatekept (Try getting access to a "regular" scientific paper) and should be freely accessible to anyone. No matter who.

I somewhat agree with you. At the same time, the effort involved in creating valuable IP can vary drastically from something I throw together on my phone like a paragraph of writing to a full movie production or huge investment in drug design for helping people live longer.

Because of the variance in production cost and ROI for effort, vs the general ability to copy IP (just the IP, which could be loads of research that isn’t valuable without loads of capital and decades of investment into certain infrastructure e.g. TSMC), there have to be some sort of incentives to do the hard groundwork that creates valuable IP that once discovered is trivial to copy or implement, otherwise people simply won’t do it, they’ll just copy and resell and then fewer people will do the initial leg work until we’re left chasing the bottom of the barrel of the level of effort someone may invest in something they have no means of capturing return from that work and risk. And not everything can be hidden behind a web service, some IP is far more challenging to protect.

So, while I tend to agree that the current implementation of IP protections is trash, I think we do need something there to encourage such work. In research we have(/had?) federal tax investment into doing such work and as a trade off, researchers get fed and live a semi comfortable or sometime decent quality of life for their efforts. I don’t have the answers to the ideal model, I know what we have isn’t great and can be improved upon in some ways, but I don’t know wha the best(TM) solution is here. I know it’s not pure unrestricted markets doing whatever they want, though.

Re: Google's AI Mode is 'the definition of theft,' publishers say

#30
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big question is whether Google followed the content licensing, and if needed, paid for it.

I'm sure they did not, but the rich guys win, even if they do something truly illegal. If they would have respected the laws, OpenAI would not have been able to create AI models at all (as they are derivatives of copyrighted works). So it's pure piracy of content at scale. The same with Veo3. Is it beneficial to humanity ? Probably yes. Is it harmful to content creators ? Absolutely but in the long-term, they have li…

It is difficult to say this is what consumers want, when right now consumers are getting the best of both worlds: The ease of AI agents without the long-term negative consequences of destroying the publishers who created all the high quality training data in the first place.

I think in the long term the highest quality content creators are going to find ways to keep their information out of AI training data, and put it behind walled gardens.

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