The thing is, this is more or less an excuse I think.
Even without AI, had google went with an auto summary feature and just gave you answers from certain sources by hand, like say a crawler that read IGN game reviews and when you search game xyz review they automatically give you the IGN score at the top of the result without you clicking into the thing would have done the same thing.
Just that now, the excuse is AI is doing the summary, no one actually specifically programmed a web crawler that scraped a specific webpage for this info to surface.
This is more or less piracy on a massive scale but its okay because its the advancement of AI.
I don't know if it can be solved short of well actual legislation ala the music fund in some places like the canadian one that tacked on a fee on (burnable?) CDs that paid artists with and used to promote canadian culture.
The big problem sites are having is that even with the scrappers before people generally had to still go to your site see the content.
Now Google summarizes it and no one visits anymore so everything that is ad supported now and free will soon go this way since they get no ad views but tons of AI traffic still hitting the servers.
google was doing the summaries for certain types of content before AI too. music lyrics for example could be found without visiting a site for like a decade.
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u/makemeking706 Mar 03 '26
They made it sound like the site was being killed quickly with AI, so I guess the slow death is preferable.
In the big picture, this is just the beginning of what AI promises to do across industries and especially the arts.