A group of Democrat Senators has asked the FTC and DOJ to investigate whether new generative AI features such as summarizers on search platforms violate US antitrust laws.
New features like Google’s AI Overviews and Search GPT are objectively useful in providing quick answers to users’ questions, but at what cost? The Senators, led by Senator Amy Klobuchar, say that the ability of generative AI to summarize or regurgitate existing content harms content creators and journalists.
Their letter addressed to the FTC and DOJ says, “Recently, multiple dominant online platforms have introduced new generative AI features that answer user queries by summarizing, or, in some cases, merely regurgitating online content from other sources or platforms. The introduction of these new generative AI features further threatens the ability of journalists and other content creators to earn compensation for their vital work.”
Generative AI poses new risks for content creators, especially journalists. With local news already in crisis, I urged the DOJ and FTC to investigate whether generative AI products threaten fair competition and innovation by repackaging original content without permission. pic.twitter.com/Jo1KdA45H1
— Senator Amy Klobuchar (@SenAmyKlobuchar) September 10, 2024
They argue that search platforms used to direct users to relevant websites where content creators benefited from the website traffic, but now their content is reworked or summarized by AI without any reward accruing to the person who created it.
The letter explained that “When a generative AI feature answers a query directly, it often forces the content creator—whose content has been relegated to a lower position on the user interface—to compete with content generated from their own work.”
Platforms like Google will respect a robots.txt instruction not to index a content creator’s website but that results in the site not showing up at all in any search queries.
Journalism under threat
The Senators claim “Dominant online platforms in areas like search, social media, e-commerce, operating systems, and app stores already abuse their gatekeeper power over the digital marketplace in ways that harm small businesses and content creators and eliminate choices for consumers.”
They say that AI could make this worse with a “potentially devastating impact” on news organizations and other content creators.
In January, Senator Klobuchar asked Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch whether his company had any choice over letting AI models scrape their content or not. Lynch said that the “opt-out” feature was introduced after existing models were trained and that it reinforces their dominance.
Lynch said, “The only thing that will do is to prevent a new competitor from training new models to compete with them, so the opt-out of the training is too late, frankly.” Condé Nast has since signed a deal with OpenAI to license its data to train its models.
Generative AI is extremely useful, but it is disrupting creative industries even as it creates new opportunities. AI is doing to online news what the internet did to print media.
A recent study quoted by the Senators says that the US has lost approximately 2,900 newspapers and that a third of those that existed in 2005 will have disappeared by the end of 2024.
AI is undoubtedly making it easier and faster to get answers to our questions but from a fast-diminishing pool of sources.
If the FTC and DOJ agree with the Senators that these generative AI features are a “form of exclusionary conduct or an unfair method of competition in violation of the antitrust laws” then Google, OpenAI, and others like them will need to rethink how they answer our queries.
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