In a bid to make its Gemini chatbot app more of one-stop shop, Google says it’s working with The Associated Press to build “a feed of real-time information” in Gemini.
Jaffer Zaidi, Google’s VP of global news partnerships, said that the goal is to “further enhance the usefulness of results” in the Gemini experience.
“As we develop new AI offerings and product[s], we’re identifying specific types of information and data that can help improve our products and services for people everywhere,” Zaidi wrote in a blog post. “This [new feed] will be particularly helpful to our users looking for up-to-date information.”
Zaidi gave no indication as to when this feature might arrive in Gemini, nor whether it’ll be visible to users in every region where the app is available.
Google, which has a longstanding partnership with the Associated Press, is but one of many companies developing AI that has sought to collaborate with news organizations to improve the accuracy of its AI technologies.
OpenAI has formed partnerships with publishers including the Financial Times, Axel Springer, and News Corp., the owner of The Wall Street Journal. Elsewhere, AI-powered search engine Perplexity has launched a program that allows publishers to earn incremental revenue when their content is referenced in results.
Several of these deals have a training component. Publishers like Condé Nast have agreed to let AI vendors with which they have a licensing agreement train AI models on their archives. The AI industry has largely pitched these arrangements as a service to journalism, but they’re also designed to shield AI companies from copyright infringement claims.
In many cases, publisher deals haven’t, in fact, noticeably improved AI companies’ products. A recent study from Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism showed that OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT, misquotes content even from publishers that have agreements with OpenAI.
Be that as it may, the dire state of the news industry is likely to push more outlets to secure what agreements they can.
