Even before Pizza Glue, the search engine Cut Back Artificial Intelligence Overviews in Search
Comment on “How AI Overviews Metastasize on the Internet” [J.C. Yu, Managing Director of BrightEdge, Inc., July 14, 2005]
A person associated with the company wrote in a statement to WIRED that the overviews will match the information on the top web results. This information isn’t a substitute for web content but it is designed to give people a sense of what is out there and can be used to learn more. Looking at the word choice and overall structure of the AI Overview in question, I disagree with Google’s characterization that the result may be just a “conceptual match” of my writing. It goes further. Even if the developers intended for the feature to be a replacement of the original work, the answer to the questions will be in a way that buries the credit and reduces the incentive for users to go to the source material.
Jim Yu, BrightEdge’s founder and executive chairman, says the drop-off suggests that Google has decided to take an increasingly cautious approach to this rollout. He says that there are some risks they are trying to manage. Yu believes that the early problems with Artificial Intelligence Overviews should be seen as a blip rather than a feature.
How Much Traffic Do I Get from Google? A Lawyer’s Perspective on the Case against Copyrighted Material in Artificial Intelligence Overviews
I’m definitely not the first person to suggest focusing on your intended audience when writing chatbot prompts, so I agree that the fact-based aspect of my writing does complicate the overall situation. It’s hard for me, though, to imagine a world where Google arrives at that exact paragraph about Claude’s chatbot in its AI Overview results without referencing my work first.
I spoke to a legal expert who was skeptical that I would be able to win any hypothetical litigation. Janet Fries, an attorney at Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath, says she doesn’t think there would be a strong case for copyrighted material being used. “Copyright law, generally, is careful not to get in the way of useful things and helpful things.” Her perspective focused on the type of content in this specific example of original work, explaining that it is quite difficult to make a claim about instructional or fact-based writing, like my advice column, versus more creative work, like poetry.
“We see that links included in AI Overviews get more clicks than if the page had appeared as a traditional web listing for that query,” said the Google spokesperson. No data to support this claim was offered to WIRED, so it’s impossible to independently verify the impact of the AI feature on click-through rates. The company compared traffic to traditional blue-link traffic from Google but not to articles that appeared in a featured section, which may have higher rates.
In a phone call and email, a Google spokesman acknowledged that part of the writing in the summaries may come from the internet, but they defended the content as being from original sources. The first paragraph of the answer is not attributed to me. My original article had 6 footnotes hyperlinked around the bottom of the result. It is hard to imagine a publisher getting a lot of traffic in this situation, with source links located so far down.
The one on the left is from an interview with a product developer about how to use Anthropic’s Claude bot. The screenshot on the right is a portion of Google’s AI Overview that answered a question about using Anthropic’s chatbot. The way it is reading the two paragraphs side by side is very similar to a classroom cheater who copied an answer from my homework and barely bothered to change it.
Last week, an Artificial Intelligence Overview search result made me fear for the future of journalism, because it used one of my WIRED articles.
