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AI Has Turned Search Engines To Answer Engines
I watched this video and understood that any of my original thoughts (well, are our thoughts ever original?) might just become a Chat GPT’s prompt result, and I would never even know about it. And that’s exactly the state of Copyright and content ownership in the current world we live in.
The video explains how AI-powered search tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Google’s AI Overviews, Perplexity among others are summarizing web content directly within search results – reducing the need for users to click through to original news sites.
A Looming Existential Crisis
This shift has led to referral traffic plunging for many publishers – some seeing declines exceeding 34% – and severely threatening ad revenue and subscription conversions. Read more here in the article The End of Publishing as We Know It from the Atlantic, HERE.
Industry leaders warn this could be the most critical inflection point since the dawn of the internet. With AI intermediating information delivery, publishers fear being completely bypassed – or facing a “Google Zero” scenario where search engines no longer drive meaningful traffic. Read more in the article on onlinequeso.com “Why AI search tools pose an ‘existential threat’ to news publishers” HERE.
Legal and Licensing Battles
Publishers are fighting back: filing lawsuits, forging licensing deals, and debating fair use and compensation frameworks. Yet these negotiations are often lopsided, given AI firms’ power and opacity about how they source content.
Anthropic scanned millions of real books to train Claude AI. By converting traditional print media into digital format, Anthropic took a distinctive path in AI development and data acquisition. This pushes us to reconsider the validity of the traditional copyright laws as companies like Anthropic might claim fair use for using these books yet transforming the output under fair use law. Read about it HERE.
What’s Next?
AI search tools are shifting how information is accessed and monetized, posing a real threat to the traditional publishing model. News organizations are urgently adapting – legally, financially, and strategically – but the stakes couldn’t be higher for journalism and public knowledge. Will the AI platforms evolve to better credit sources? What will be the future of publishing and of original content and its owners?
Only time will tell.
During the last two decades, the leading surveillance capitalists – Google, later followed by Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft, helped to drive this societal transformation while simultaneously ensuring their ascendance to the pinnacle of the epistemic hierarchy. They operated in the shadows to amass huge knowledge monopolies by taking without asking, a maneuver that every child recognizes as theft. Surveillance capitalism begins by unilaterally taking a claim to private human raw material for translation into experience as behavioral data.
~ The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff
Why AI Search Tools Pose An Existential Threat to Publishers
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Featured Image: Screenshot from the YouTube video titled: Why AI search tools pose an ‘existential threat’ to news publishers • FRANCE 24 English
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