Meanwhile, Google is also using its leverage over the web to extract data to train its AI models for free. The company's Search Generative Experience (SGE) is being trained on content from the web, leading to concerns over diminishing referrals and decreasing affiliate revenue for publishers. Google's position is that if its search crawlers can see content on the open web, it can use that content to train AI. This has led to potential legal battles over whether scraping data to train AI models is fair use.
Key takeaways:
- Google has announced a deal with Universal Music Group to develop an AI framework to help work toward common goals, signaling that it will pay off the music industry with special deals that create brand-new private intellectual property rights.
- Google's position when it comes to the web is explicit: if its search crawlers can see content on the open web, it can use that content to train AI. This has raised concerns about copyright infringement and fair use.
- Google's YouTube platform is likely to expand Content ID to flag content with voices that sound like UMG artists, allowing UMG to take those videos down or collect royalties for those songs and videos.
- The looming AI copyright cases have the potential to upend the internet as we know it, copyright law itself, and potentially lead to a drastic rethinking of what people can and cannot do with the art they encounter in their lives.