According to an Adweek source, Google has been secretly inking agreements with certain publishers to employ new generative AI technologies for story publication. The agreements, which are purportedly valued at tens of thousands of dollars annually, appear to be a part of the Google News Initiative (GNI), a six-year-old initiative that provides funding for fact-checking tools, media literacy initiatives, and other newsroom resources. However, the company’s entry into generative AI publishing tools would be a novel and perhaps contentious move.
Adweek reports that the initiative is presently focusing on a “handful” of smaller publishers. According to Adweek, “by indexing recently published reports generated by other organizations, like government agencies and neighboring news outlets, and then summarizing and publishing them as a new article, the beta tools let under-resourced publishers create aggregated content more efficiently.”
In exchange for media firms agreeing to use the tools to create at least three articles a day, one weekly newsletter, and one monthly marketing campaign, it is unclear exactly how much publishers are paid under the deal, however Adweek reports it’s a “five-figure sum” annually.
Of note, publishers in the program are apparently not required to disclose their use of AI, nor are the aggregated websites informed that their content is being used to create AI-written stories on other sites. The AI-generated copy reportedly uses a color-coded system to indicate the reliability of each section of text to help human editors review the content before publishing.
Google didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. In a statement to Adweek the company said it was “in the early stages of exploring ideas to potentially provide AI-enabled tools to help journalists with their work.” The spokesperson added that the AI tools “are not intended to, and cannot, replace the essential role journalists have in reporting, creating and fact-checking their articles.”
It’s not clear what Google is getting out of the arrangement, though it wouldn’t be the first tech company to pay newsrooms to use proprietary tools. The arrangement bears some similarities to the deals Facebook once struck with publishers to create live video content in 2016. The social media company made headlines as it paid publishers millions of dollars to juice its nascent video platform and dozens of media outlets opted to “pivot to video” as a result.
