Rolling Stone And Billboard Owners Sue Google Overviews AI Features

Rolling Stone, Billboard, and Variety, have filed a lawsuit against Google (photo: x z @benfritz ·)

JAKARTA - Penske Media Corporation (PMC), the parent company of well-known magazines such as Rolling Stone, Billboard, and Variety, filed a lawsuit against Google on Friday 12 September. This lawsuit marks the first time a major US issuer has sued Google in court regarding the "AI Overviews" feature featuring a summary of search results using artificial intelligence (AI).

PMC accuses Google of using their journalism without permission to fill in the AI Overviews feature that appears at the top of Google search results. As a result, users immediately get answers from the AI summary without the need to click on and visit their original website. This practice is said to have significantly reduced traffic to PMC sites.

In its lawsuit, PMC states that Google will only include publisher websites in its search results if they also allow articles to be used for AI Overviews. PMC accuses Google of leveraging its market dominance of nearly 90% in the US to impose these conditions, thus avoiding having to pay publishers for their content use to train its AI system.

PMC claims that about 20% of Google searches leading to their site now feature AI Overviews, and this number is predicted to increase. They say that their affiliated revenue has fallen more than a third from its peak and is expected to continue to deteriorate until the end of 2024 due to a decline in search traffic.

Google Response

Google spokesman Jose Castaneda has denied the lawsuit and stated that AI Overviews actually provides a better experience for users and can send traffic to more variety of websites.

Google argues that with this feature, people find Search more helpful and uses it more often, which creates new opportunities for content to be found. Google says it will defend itself against claims they call "baseless".

The lawsuit reflects broader concerns in the media industry about AI technology. online education company Chegg has also sued Google on similar charges in February.

Meanwhile, AI companies such as OpenAI (ChatGPT makers) have signed licensing deals and paid major publishers such as the News Corp and Financial Times to use their content. Google is considered slower in making similar deals.

Google's recent victory in antitrust cases, which allows them not to have to sell Chrome browsers, is also said to have disappointed publishers because they feel they have no power to refuse to be included in the AI Overviews feature.