Google is now facing a lawsuit from Rolling Stones' parent company, Penske Media Corporation, which is alleging that the AI Overviews technology is hurting websites and their journalists.
The publication company is the first major American media company to sue Google because of its AI Overviews, particularly as it allegedly steals content from these sites to feature on the technology.
It is known that Google's AI Overviews get content from different websites and collate them to deliver a quick summary regarding what users searched for, appearing on top of all search results.
Google Faces Lawsuit on AI Overview Technology
The latest report from The Wall Street Journal details the latest lawsuit Google is facing, with Penske Media Corporation taking on the tech giant's AI-powered search feature. Penske Media, the parent company of publications like Rolling Stones, Billboard, Variety, and more, has alleged that the company illegally takes from the work of its writers.
Apart from this, Penske Media claims that Google's AI Overviews are significantly hurting their website's traffic as users are more inclined to read the AI-generated summaries instead of visiting the direct source.
Google's AI Overviews give users a detailed summary based on their results, with the AI-generated content gathering information from the top aggregated websites that appear on search. That said, Google still provides links leading directly to legitimate websites, but its feature allegedly trumps the need for it.
Penske Media Wants AI Overviews Gone
Because of AI Overviews, Penske Media claims that their revenue via affiliate links saw a 1/3 crash this year, with site attributes to them taking a significant drop via Google.
Penske Media Corporation alleges that they have two choices to stop AI Overviews from doing what it is designed to do. They could either stop allowing Google to index their sites and be completely taken off the search platform or continue to allow Google to use their content for search results, including AI Overviews.
AI Overviews and Its Issues
Last year, Google's promise to integrate more AI technology into its search experiences brought one of the most controversial features to users, and that is AI Overviews. The feature has allegedly caused users to be confused as the technology delivered inaccurate and incorrect results in its first iteration.
Because of its early generative AI blunders, Google has decided to roll back on AI Overviews and temporarily featured it less on its search engine. Since then, Google has gradually increased AI Overviews' visibility on the platform as it learned more from the aggregated results it got, with the company improving it over time and making it more available to users.
Google has since focused on going all-in on its AI-powered search engine, with the next step to it being the AI Mode, which completely takes over the results page with summarized information and hides all websites.
Originally published on Tech Times
