8/8/2023 0 Comments Knockknock stuf![]() Pearson is also in litigation, but won’t say against who. ![]() These AI models have already scraped what they can, and are very coy about how they obtained it, although sometimes they are careless and give the game away – Stability AI didn’t even bother to remove the watermarks from the Getty Images it scooped up, which made it very easy for Getty to sue. The large language models which underpin generative AI services like ChatGPT and Midjourney are useless without training. They want content not just from newspapers, but the owners of image libraries, commercial illustrators, visual artists, and database owners. No, and why?īut history rhymes, and today Google and the AI companies are singing a very similar tune. The publishers regarded this proposition in the same way that Saturday shoppers might consider a compulsive exhibitionist streaking down Bond Street naked, demanding that everyone else strip off. If only those foolish publishers had exposed their material to Google’s search crawlers, this awkward episode would never have happened. ![]() The problem lay with the owners of newspapers, magazines, periodicals and books who had arrogantly – in the bloggers' view – refused to give Google what it wanted, on the terms it demanded. It wasn’t their fault and it wasn’t Google’s fault that this had happened, they protested. It showed that just as in Animal Farm, some animals were more equal than others. Googlewashing demolished the proposition that the new internet utopia would be a fair and an egalitarian one. Within weeks, alas, spammers had noticed too, ending that brief golden age when Google was a pristine and breathtakingly efficient source of knowledge.īut surely the bloggers must have been pleased with their discovery? Google had anointed these obscure self-publishers as Kings of the Hill, giving them extraordinary reach and exposure, at the expense of the biggest brand names in media. I gave this a name, “Googlewashing”, and the term went viral: newspapers including Le Monde and The New York Times weighed in. It was very easy: all they had to do was quote each other frequently from their own weblogs. Twenty years ago, a small group of utopian internet enthusiasts discovered that they could rig Google’s search results so that they came out on top.
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