Google’s various AI tools have been proving their worth as of late, but a common criticism is how Google has.
Google’s various AI tools have been proving their worth as of late, but a common criticism is how Google has built these tools by scraping the work of publishers and creators across the web without explicit permission or compensation, and now the EU is launching an investigation into the matter.
The European Commission this week announced that it has opened a “formal antitrust investigation” into how Google has built its AI tools, namely around how Google may or may not have given itself “privileged access” to online content that its AI rivals lack, and also around how Google’s scraping of the web has affected publishers and creators.
There are two key things the EU is looking at here in terms of how Google’s actions affect content on the web, including how Google has used the content of web publishers, as well as videos uploaded to YouTube. For the former, the announcement mentions how Google does not allow publishers to opt out of having their content used in Google’s AI search tools without opting out of Google Search entirely – a death knell to any website.
