Google inks a Gemini AI chatbot deal with the Associated Press

Google says its artificial intelligence chatbot Gemini will deliver up-to-date news from the Associated Press in the tech giant’s first such deal with a news publisher.

Google announced the deal in a blog post Wednesday, saying that AP “will now deliver a feed of real-time information to help further enhance the usefulness of results displayed in the Gemini app.”

AP’s chief revenue officer, Kristin Heitmann, said it is part of a longstanding relationship with the search giant “based on working together to provide timely, accurate news and information to global audiences.”

“We are pleased Google recognizes the value of AP’s journalism as well as our commitment to nonpartisan reporting, in the development of its generative AI products,” Heitmann said in a written statement.

Neither company has disclosed how much Google will pay AP for the content. Google declined further comment on how it would present information from AP’s journalism and whether it would credit the news organization or link back to the original articles.

Gemini, formerly known as Bard, has been Google’s answer to the demand for generative AI tools that can compose documents, generate images, help program code, or perform other work.

AP has sought to diversify its revenue stream in recent years and in 2023 signed a deal with OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, enabling the AI company to license AP’s archive of news stories to train future versions of its AI systems. The financial terms of that deal were also not disclosed, but it sparked an increasing number of similar partnerships between OpenAI and news organizations around the world.

At the same time, news organizations have expressed concerns about AI companies using their material without permission—or payment—and then unfairly competing with them for advertising revenue that comes when people use a search engine or click on a news website. The New York Times and other outlets have sued OpenAI and other AI companies for copyright infringement and, on Tuesday, presented their arguments before a New York federal judge.

Tech companies have argued that freely taking publicly available text from the internet to teach their AI models constitutes a “fair use” under U.S. copyright laws. But faced with legal challenges and a technology that is prone to spouting errors known as hallucinations, AI companies have also sought to license high-quality data sources to improve the performance of their products.

Publishers are at a disadvantage as tech companies integrate AI-generated summaries of information into an array of online services, but such deals are also beneficial in giving news outlets much-needed revenue and improving the overall quality of information that people are seeing online, said Alex Mahadevan, director of The Poynter Institute’s Mediawise, a digital media literacy initiative.

“You either sign a deal with an AI company and work with them and kind of take what they offer for all of your hard work, all of your articles, all of your data, or you fight, the way that The New York Times and others are trying to do in court,” he said.

The AP prides itself on being an unbiased news source and offers news stories, pictures, video, audio and interactive content direct to consumers via the website APNews.com. But the bulk of its business comes from selling its journalism to organizations that use it.

The AP has experienced a precipitous loss in revenue from newspaper customers, including losing Gannett and McClatchy—two of the largest traditional U.S. newspaper publishers—last year. The AP has increasingly secured other sources of revenue, including philanthropic funding, but is still hurt by the news industry’s overall woes.

“The AP has copious amounts of data and text, which are the equivalent of gold in terms of training advanced generative AI models,” said Sarah Kreps, a professor and director of Cornell University’s Tech Policy Institute. While such deals might help offset some revenue losses, they also present dangers.

“By outsourcing their value to tech companies, news outlets may cede control over how their work is used and monetized,” Kreps said by email. “Instead of building stronger, direct relationships with readers, they risk becoming suppliers of raw material for platforms that then commodify and repurpose their journalism.”

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