A new report suggests Google is paying a five-figure sum to some independent publications to publish articles generated by its AI tool.
Google seems to be paying a five-figure sum to a handful of independent news publication websites to post AI-generated articles. The tech giant is reportedly doing so to test and improve an unreleased AI model.
According to a recent report by AdWeek, Google has signed an agreement with some publishers to post AI-generated content for 12 months. In return, the publications will get a monthly sum that will annually amount to a five-figure sum.
The tech giant also seems to be offering these publications tools to produce the content. Adweek’s report also claims that the offer is part of the Google News Initiative and is aimed at helping small publications create ‘aggregated content’ using data from other sources like government agencies and local news outlets.
However, these publishers who signed the deal will have to “compile a list of external websites that regularly produce news and reports relevant to their readership.” The report also states that external publications are not asked for their consent their data is scraped and are not notified about the same.
While Google does not ask publishers to mark these articles as AI-generated, they have to publish three articles every day, one newsletter a week and a marketing campaign every week.
The tool’s dashboard supposedly gives users the option to get an AI-generated summary of a news story from these external websites that can be edited or published after being reviewed by a human editor. According to 9to5Google, Google partially confirmed the report but refused that the AI tools will use information from other outlets. The new tool was launched earlier this month, but we have no information on which publications are using them right now.
Source:indianexpress.com