this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
61 points (98.4% liked)
PurchaseWithPurpose
1058 readers
252 users here now
A community driven to showing our voice through the things we buy and use.
A few useful links:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
What they're doing isn't a crime. They're just reading headlines and producing (very) short summaries. Load Google news and what you see there is the problem.
A lot of the time, people don't want or need to read the full article. Everything they wanted to know is in the headline and occasionally, the byline. When Google or Meta reproduce that headline and/or a super short summary on their sites with the link, the end users are getting the gist of the article without loading the ads that would have been displayed if they went to the original site.
This is fine. It's not a crime. It's not even unethical! They're literally implementing "the web" as it is meant to be used since forever.
If you want to outlaw this, you're advocating for a very ugly reality where people can't even use
curland/or Python to grab news headlines for their own purposes.Remember when Windows 7 shipped with news headlines in the widget sidebar? That had the same problem (for publishers).
That's not what they're asking permission for. They want unlimited access to copyrighted information for the purposes of training their AI models, not just using the developed models to output article summaries.
Also, on your thing, regardless of whether or not they provide a link to the original source(s), summarizing others work to hijack their ad revenue is absolutely unethical if you think compensating people for their work is ethical and inevitably leads to the decline in actual first-party reporting and real journalism.
The only ones who benefit long-term from an AI-summary-fueled media landscape are those who have a direct profit motive to produce content, aka corporations and government propaganda.
If independent media fails, your Google news feed will just become slopped up versions of coporate press releases and propaganda echo chambers.
Absolute best case scenario in this unregulated hellscape is Google figures out a way to pay the first party reporting groups to keep "independent" journalism alive, but even that basically makes all "independent" media totally dependent on Google revenue streams (not to mention it sounds a lot like "paying to access copyrighted content", the exact thing they're lobbying against).
Finally, Google has made it clear that though they want total ability to modify news coverage as they see fit, they want 0 liability for those modifications. When their AI slops out hallucinations with real world consequences, they want zero responsibility, which is also "unethical".