Google announced the deal in a blog post published Wednesday, saying the AP will now “provide a real-time feed of information to help improve the relevance of results displayed in the Gemini app.”
AP revenue director Kristin Heitmann said it was a long-standing relationship “based on collaboration to provide accurate news and information to global audiences.”
“We are pleased that Google recognizes the value of AP journalism and our commitment to nonpartisan reporting in the development of its generative AI products,” she added in a written statement.
Neither company revealed how much Google would pay the AP for the content. Google declined to comment further on how it would present information from the AP and whether it would credit the news organization or instead link to the original articles.
Gemini, formerly known as Bard, was Google’s answer to the demand for generative AI tools that could compose documents, generate images, help program code, or perform other work.
The AP has sought to diversify its revenue streams in recent years and in 2023 signed a deal with OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, allowing the AI company to license the news article archives of the AP to train future versions of its AI systems. The financial terms of this agreement were also not disclosed.
This has led to a growing number of similar partnerships between OpenAI and news organizations around the world.
However, media outlets have expressed concerns that AI companies are using their hardware without permission — or without payment — and then unfairly competing with them for advertising revenue that comes from using a search engine. or a click on a news site.
The New York Times and other media outlets filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and other AI companies for copyright infringement and presented their arguments to a federal judge in New York on Tuesday.
Tech companies have argued that taking publicly available text from the internet for free to teach their AI models constitutes “fair use” under U.S. copyright laws.
But facing legal challenges and technology that tends to generate errors, known as hallucinations, AI companies have also sought to license high-quality data sources to improve the performance of their products.
Publishers are at a disadvantage as tech companies integrate AI-generated news summaries into a range of online services, but such deals are also beneficial for providing media outlets with much-needed revenue and improving the overall quality of news that people see online, according to Alex Mahadevan, director of Mediawise, a digital media education initiative of the Poynter Institute.
“Either you sign a deal with an AI company and you work with them and you accept what they offer you in exchange for all your hard work, all your articles, all your data, or you fight, like “The New York Times and others are trying to do this in court,” he said.
The AP is an unbiased news source and provides news articles, images, video, audio and interactive content directly to consumers through the APNews.com website, but the bulk of its business comes from the sale of its content to the organizations that use it.
The AP suffered a precipitous loss of revenue from its newspaper customers, including Gannett and McClatchy — two of America’s largest traditional newspaper publishers — last year.
The AP has secured other sources of revenue, including philanthropic funding, but it is still affected by the general woes of the news industry.
“AP has abundant amounts of data and text, which is the equivalent of gold when it comes to training advanced generative AI models,” said Sarah Kreps, professor and director of the Tech Policy Institute at AP. Cornell University.
While these agreements can help offset some revenue losses, they also present dangers, she noted.
“By outsourcing their value to tech companies, media outlets risk ceding control over how their work is used and monetized. Instead of building stronger, more direct relationships with readers, they risk becoming suppliers of raw material for platforms that subsequently commodify and reuse their journalistic work.”
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