Most gallingly for publishers, Google’s AI search was trained, in part, on their content and other material from across the web—without payment. The changes risk damaging website owners that produce the written material vital to both Google’s search engine and its powerful AI models. Publishing executives complained in some sessions about the AI search tool, saying it would deprive them of traffic and therefore revenue, the people said. Google began rolling out the AI search tool in May by letting users opt into testing. During Chinese President Xi Jinping’s recent visit to San Francisco, the Google AI search bot responded to the question “What did President Xi say?"

Source: Wall Street Journal December 14, 2023 13:32 UTC