According to Reuters, the group known as the Independent Publisher Alliance has filed an anti-trust complaint with the European Commission over a brief overview of Google's AI.
The complaint accuses Google of “misuse web content of an overview of Google's AI in its AI search.”
Additionally, unless they are willing to disappear entirely from Google's search results, publishers say they have “no option to opt out” of the material used in AI summary.
It's been over a year since Google started adding AI-generated summaries at the top of some web search results. And despite some early responses that were grandly off the mark, the feature continues to expand, causing a massive decline in traffic reportedly for news publishers.
“The new AI experience in search allows people to ask more questions and create new opportunities for content and companies to be discovered,” Google told Reuters. The company also argued that claims about web traffic are often based on incomplete data, and that “sites can acquire and lose traffic for a variety of reasons.”