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I'm pretty excited to see how this will develop, especially in the context of "Google Zero". Proving the existence of an anti-competitive effect and quantifying it precisely could be difficult.
Compensation to which publishers? To those providing links to SEO spam?

If I'm to pay (indirectly) for the content which is used to form the response, we need to match the content that was actually used, not just the content that was sourced, otherwise we'd be rewarding SEO garbage again.

> The European Commission said it would examine whether the firm used data from websites to provide this service - and if it failed to offer "appropriate compensation" to publishers.

While the EU wastes their time with things like this, they fall further and further behind the curve, still wondering why no one wants to start a business there.

I’m often horrified to follow them down the rabbit hole and see it is a Redditor’s comment. That should terrify you if you have ever used Reddit. Sometimes it is correct, but a lot of times it is very much not right.
It seems highly unlikely that AI summaries violate European copyright law. Human summarization is perfectly legal.
Why does is feel like EU is creating problems out of nothing just to keep their bureaucrats busy rather than actually doing something worthwhile with tax payers money?
Soon the European Commission will investigate the EU for all its investigations.

They might as well just ban all non-EU tech at this point.

Google's AI summaries are actively harming quite a lot of people. They're regularly filled with misinformation, but they're presented as facts, complete with references. Many people do not understand the limitations of this technology, and simply believe what they're presented.

I'm not convinced that Google understands the limitations, to be honest. The most charitable interpretation I can give of their motivations is that they're terrified of competition from OpenAI, and are trying to present an alternative. Unfortunately, they're presenting a woefully inadequate product.

It goes further though, into legitimate questions of copyright, which the tech industry has always fought against. (Take first, deal with it later is the MO.)

Although that certainly would have been possible, I've not yet blocked the Gemini AI summaries from the Google search result pages, just because they're so entertaining, in a "sure, bot, you got that entirely wrong" sort of way.

And if publisher's rights will be the downfall of that entertainment, I totally get it, but it will be a sad day anyway... (and, quite frankly, my money is still on "libel" for the reason these summaries get nuked in Europe, and it'll be an UK court, not the EU, that triggers this).

I still have not gotten anyone to provide a reasonable response to a simple question; if training an AI on some content, how is your reading the same content and then including that in a synthesis of that information along with other information to form your own understanding of the world any different?

Alternately, will you start using royalties in perpetuity whenever you talk about some event, because you read an article or a book about that topic once and included something you learned in that article?

Basically everything you know, that is even somewhat recent is based on others’ content, do you track and cite every single thing you’ve ever read and send them royalties with every conversation?

I’m not trying to defend these big corporations, but for me this is a fundamental question we need to be asking.

As consequential as it will be, for me, the answer is that as long as you paid the cost of accessing the content (be it free or a subscription price) while collecting the information that is used to fundamentally transform the information in ways that seem to fall under fair use, then you cannot expect rights, short of full copy/paste plagiarism.

Many news articles have social media posts as sources. Most articles have other articles as sources. And then wikipedia takes the info from the news articles and compiles them. Now google takes all of these and creates summaries again and they have links to original sources in the ai summaries. EU Commission seems very naive and fallen out of time. They are not gonna stuff the AI revolution back into the bottle no matter how hard they try.