(Headline USA) While some media platforms, including social-media giant Meta and the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post may be responding to the return of President Donald Trump by scaling back on their aggressively woke propaganda, others are doubling down.
Alarmingly, that may include newly emerging artificial intelligence, which users assume to be presenting factually accurate information. Instead, Google’s AI system, like its search engine, will manipulate users by promoting a radical agenda through the far-left Associated Press.
Google says its chatbot Gemini will now deliver up-to-date news from the AP in the tech giant’s first such deal with a news publisher.
Headline USA also uses the AP as an information source for articles (including this one) and photographs but typically curates and contextualizes those articles to eliminate the bias.
Not so for Google’s AI, which will be driven by the same algorithms and machine learning that Google controversially used to replace historical figures with underrepresented minorities.
Google announced the deal in a blog post Wednesday, saying that AP “will now deliver a feed of real-time information to help further enhance the usefulness of results displayed in the Gemini app.”
It is part of a longstanding relationship with the search giant “based on working together to provide timely, accurate news and information to global audiences,” said Kristin Heitmann, AP’s chief revenue officer.
“We are pleased Google recognizes the value of AP’s journalism as well as our commitment to nonpartisan reporting, in the development of its generative AI products,” Heitmann dubiously claimed in a written statement.
Neither company has disclosed how much Google will pay AP for the content. Google declined further comment on how it would present information from AP’s journalism and whether it would credit the news organization or link back to the original articles.
AP has sought to diversify its revenue stream in recent years and in 2023 signed a deal with OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, enabling the AI company to license AP’s archive of news stories to train future versions of its AI systems. The financial terms of that deal were also not disclosed, but it sparked an increasing number of similar partnerships between OpenAI and news organizations around the world.
At the same time, news organizations have expressed concerns about AI companies using their material without permission—or payment—and then unfairly competing with them for advertising revenue that comes when people use a search engine or click on a news website.
The New York Times and other outlets have sued OpenAI and other AI companies for copyright infringement and, on Tuesday, presented their arguments before a New York federal judge.
Tech companies have argued that freely taking publicly available text from the internet to teach their AI models constitutes a “fair use” under U.S. copyright laws. But faced with legal challenges and a technology that is prone to spouting errors, known as hallucinations, AI companies have also sought to license high-quality data sources to improve the performance of their products.
The bulk of the AP’s business comes from selling its journalism to organizations that use it as part of a syndicated wire service. However, the organization was also revealed to have accepted grants from a number of globalist foundations that promoted advocacy for woke causes such as climate change. While it sometimes discloses stories that used direct funding earmarked for advocacy journalism, the vast majority of stories related to the issues in question do not disclose its conflicts of interest or other biases.
The company took a major hit last year when two news chains, Gannett and McClatchy, said they would stop buying news from AP, in Gannett’s case ending a relationship that had lasted more than a century.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
