09 Feb Google Fights Back ChatGPT

Google has long dominated search, and it is going to undergo significant change in response to the growing threat of ChatGPT. New AI functions may exacerbate fights with content providers.

Google launched Bard, a conversational chatbot that would be integrated into search, on Monday.

Bard, like Microsoft’s updated Bing search engine, is intended to provide answers immediately inside search.

Publishers may have another opportunity to complain that their work is being utilized without appropriate pay.

Google has fought with publishers all over the world about remuneration for article snippets that show in search results for many years. The announcement of Google’s new search chatbot this week is expected to raise the question of whether Google is utilizing others’ work without appropriate remuneration once more.

Google presented its much-anticipated answer to ChatGPT on Monday. The conversational chatbot technology known as Bard is being integrated into search, initially as a short test while the business gathers feedback. Bard, like ChatGPT, allows users to ask broad, open-ended inquiries and receive answers immediately from the search-results page — for example, what to eat for lunch or how to arrange a baby shower.

Microsoft, which recently announced a multibillion-dollar investment in ChatGPT’s inventor, OpenAI, plans to integrate the chatbot into its Bing search engine as well. On Tuesday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella declared that “it’s a new day for search,” as he presented the updated Bing with ChatGPT.

Both search engines will have to consider how to monetize the use of chatbots in search, as well as how this will effect their relationships with content publishers. Given its dominance in the search-engine business, Google has a long history of similar confrontations; the web-analytics site Statcounter believes it has a 93% market share. According to observers, these technologies will almost probably be scrutinized closely.

“If a website publisher loses visits, they may lose advertising income,” said Franklin Graves, a Nashville-based technology, media, and intellectual property attorney. “If that advertising revenue is then redirected to the company powering the search engine, which is also the same company that scraped the information from the website publisher in the first place, I don’t see how the search-engine company can argue against any downstream harm caused by their actions.”

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Defending content producers

Publishers have complained that, despite the fact that they create the material that drives people to search in the first place, Google siphons off valuable ad money. Google has responded by claiming that improvements to its search discoverability generate more traffic, not less, to the open web.

That argument hasn’t always been persuasive. After Google was compelled to pay publishers in Spain to display their content in Google News, the company dropped out of the nation entirely. It resurfaced last year when Spain’s copyright regulations were altered.

Google has attempted to appease publishers by establishing a $1 billion fund in 2020, which it is using to strike arrangements in Australia (where it is also involved in a protracted legal battle) and other countries. The money is confined to a few publishers and will only endure till 2023.

Graves believes Microsoft and Google should put in place safeguards to prevent news publishers and content-driven sites like blogs from losing revenue-generating chances.

He said that the businesses’ pronouncements did not appear to solve the issue, and it is unclear how material will be “gathered and fed” into artificial-intelligence models.

“I don’t see how the media and entertainment sectors could let this pass without understanding where it ends,” Graves added.

Government investigation

Google has endured tremendous internal turbulence over the years as it has put out AI-powered technologies, and it is probable that it has not rolled out a tool like Bard until now because to fears about how the public and regulators would react to it. The Justice Department has filed a lawsuit against Google in an attempt to undercut its position in internet advertising.

Bank of America Global Research analysts stated in an investor note Tuesday that they expected “substantial government interest in the technology” and saw a need for regulation over AI safety risks such as misinformation and prejudice.

Google was already chastised when marketing material promoting Bard included an incorrect answer to a query concerning photographs acquired by the James Webb Space Telescope of a planet outside of Earth’s solar system. While some debate whether Bard is technically correct, the perplexing phrase is the first of many challenges for Google in developing natural-language chatbots that perform as expected. Microsoft may confront similar difficulties as it launches its new Bing search engine.

Still, people are rarely happy with bits of information, and AI may continue to drive search traffic to websites by encouraging users to seek additional context, according to Peter Yu, a law professor at Texas A&M University.

“Readers desire storylines, points of view, and believability,” Yu explained. Let’s say what ChatGPT unfolds

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