The chief executive of the largest digital and printing printer in the US accused Google of being a bad actress to drag her websites to support AI products of the search giant.
Neil Vogel, Managing Director of People, Inc. (formerly Dotdash Meredith), a publisher who exploits more than 40 brands, including people, food and wine, travel + leisure, best houses and gardens, real simple, southern living, allrecipes and others, said that found for Google search engine as to support AI features.
“Google has a detector, which means they use the same detector for their search, where they are still sending us traffic, as they do for their AI products, where they steal our content,” Vogel said, speaking to The Fortune Brainstorm Tech Conference This week.
He noted that three years ago, Google Search represented about 65% of the company’s traffic and this has since fallen into the “high 20s”. (Vogel shared an even more amazing statistical element with Adexchange last month, saying that since several years ago, Google traffic represented up to 90% of the release of People Inc. by open tissue.)
“They are not complaining. We have grown our audience, we have developed our revenue,” Vogel told the conference participants. “We’re doing great. What is not right for this is: You can’t get our content to compete with us.”
Vogel believes publishers need more leverage in the AI era, so he feels that it is necessary to prevent AI Crawlers automated programs that scan websites to train AI systems – as this can force them to content agreements. His company, for example, has an agreement with Openai, which Vogel described as a “good actor”.
People Inc. It takes advantage of the latest solution of the Web Infrastructure Company Cloudflare to prevent AI detectors who do not pay, urging AI players to reach the publisher with possible content agreements. While Vogel will not immediately name the companies involved, he said they were “large LLM providers”. No agreements have yet been signed, but Vogel said the company is “much further” than before adopting the blockage solution.
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However, Vogel pointed out, the Google detector cannot be excluded, as this would also prevent the publisher’s websites to be adjusted to Google search, cutting off that Google’s “20%” of the release still offers.
“They know this, and they don’t separate their detector, so it’s a deliberate bad actor here,” Vogel said.
Janice Min, editor -in -chief and chief executive at Provider Newsletter Ankler mediaHe agreed, calling large technology companies such as Google and Meta in the long run “Kleptomaniacs content”.
“I don’t see the benefit to work with any AI company right now,” she said, adding that her company is blocking AI Crawlers.
Meanwhile, CEO of Cloudflare Matthew Prince, whose company is making the Ai-Blocking solution (and who was also in the team), said that he believed things would change in the future when it comes to how AI behaves. He suspected that these changes could be caused by new regulations.
The Cloudflare Exec was also challenged if the fight against AI companies using legal solutions around things such as the copyright law created for the time before the time, was the right answer.
“I think it’s a fool’s task to get off this path, because, in the law on copyright, the more derivative is something, the more it is protected by fair use … What these AI companies do is that they really create derivatives,” Prince said. “And so, if you look at the best case -law that has come out so far, it is said that the use of anthropomorphic and others – the reason that the man recently settled with all book publishers for $ 1.5 billion – was to maintain the positive decision of copyright.”
The prince also proclaimed that “everything that is wrong with the world today is, at some level, a mistake by Google” because the search giant had taught publishers to appreciate traffic over the original content creation, causing publishers such as Buzzfeed to write for clicks. He also admitted that Google was at a hard point right now.
“Internally, they have huge battles for what they are doing and my prediction is that, this time next year, Google will pay content creators to drag their content and take it and put it on AI models,” he said.
