Google Announces New Generative AI For Search Engine That Does The Searching For You, Threatens Journalism Industry

Earlier this week Google announced plans to integrate generative AI into their commonly used search engine, via their Gemini AI model, which they say, “Google will take care of the legwork.”

Gemini will quickly curate an answer based on the prompt given in the search engine and generate some answers based on the popular articles out in the ether. “Google will do the Googling for you,” the company says.

The AI model will also allow people to upload a video and Gemini will curate results to troubleshoot an issue or answer a question, for example. “Maybe you bought a record player at a thrift shop, but it’s not working when you turn it on and the metal piece with the needle is drifting unexpectedly,” Google says. “Searching with video saves you the time and trouble of finding the right words to describe this issue, and you’ll get an AI Overview with steps and resources to troubleshoot.”

The announcement has some worried that this will cause publications to lose tons of revenue. Danielle Coffey, the chief executive of the News/Media Alliance, said in a statement to CNN:

This will be catastrophic to our traffic, as marketed by Google to further satisfy user queries, leaving even less incentive to click through so that we can monetize our content.

The little traffic we get today will be further diminished, and with a dominant search engine that’s cementing its market power, we once again have to adhere to their terms. This time with a product that directly competes with our content, using our content to fuel it. This is a perverse twist on ‘innovation.’

Marc McCollum, chief innovation officer at Raptive, which provides services to thousands of only creators and businesses, also said in a statement: “Our initial analysis suggests it will significantly reduce search traffic to content creators’ websites, directly impacting their ad revenue and, by extension, their livelihoods. This change could put the future of the open internet in danger.”

CNN added: ‘The announcement from Google, which newsrooms had expected and expressed worry over in both public and private forums in recent months, is poised to further batter an industry that has been dealt a series of brutal blows — much of it at the hands of Big Tech — over the last several years. It also comes as OpenAI reportedly readies to launch its own A.I.-powered search engine…