Will Google’s AI Plans Destroy the Media?

Early this year, Google teased a fundamental change to its core product, the search engine through which much of the world accesses the web. Soon, the company said, Google would start using AI to “distill complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats.” By May, the company had a real product to share.

For Google, it was an obvious and incremental feature update combining two of the company’s products: a text generator plugged into a search engine, basically. Searchers ask a question, and Google tries to answer it with short, article-style “snapshots.”

For publishers, however — of news, how-to content, reviews, recommendations, reference material, and a range of other content one might describe as existing to “distill complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats” — it looked like nothing less than an existential crisis. Google was getting into content, automating the work of its partners, and dramatically altering the terms of its informal deal with publishers that has sustained digital media for years: You make content; we send traffic; everyone sells ads. If this wasn’t a threat to journalism directly, it was certainly a threat to the journalism business. Google, it seemed, was eager to cut the publishers out.