Penske Media has sued Google over its AI summaries of news stories, alleging that the tech giant is using its journalism without consent and, as a result, reducing web traffic to the sites it owns, including Variety, Billboard and Rolling Stone.
The federal lawsuit was filed Friday in Washington, D.C., Reuters reported. News organizations have been sounding the alarm on Google’s news “AI Overviews” for months, saying they deplete users’ clicks directly into their ad- and subscription-supported reporting. But the federal lawsuit appears to be the first time the Alphabet-owned Google has been taken to court over the practice.
Penske says Google leverages the practice by only including publishers in web search results who permit the use of articles in AI summaries. Google would be required to pay publishers to summarize news articles or use them to train its AI systems without this leverage, the lawsuit states.
“We have a responsibility to proactively fight for the future of digital media and preserve its integrity – all of which is threatened by Google’s current actions,” the Penske lawsuit said, according to Reuters. It argues that a fifth of Google searches linked to sites also display “Overviews,” and expects that percentage to increase.
Google responded Saturday by saying overviews are the preferred user experience, and that they deploy web traffic across a broader range of publishers.
“With AI Overviews, people find Search more helpful and use it more, creating new opportunities for content to be discovered. We will defend against these meritless claims,” Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda told Reuters.
The lawsuit comes on the heels of a rare Google antitrust victory, in which a judge ruled that Alphabet will not have to sell its Chrome browser to open up search competition. Publishers decried the ruling, saying it leaves them without an AI-summaries opt-out.
After a flurry of lawsuits, OpenAI has signed several deals with major publishers to train ChatGPT, while Google has been slower to sign deals to interface with its Gemini AI.
