Greetings from the Brand Innovators Executive Retreat on Shelter Island. I'm here to do a 90-minute workshop on AI for Brand Marketers. (If you're wondering, Shelter Island is west of Westeros.)
In the news: Eight senators urging an investigation into the antitrust implications of AI-generated content summaries by companies like Google. They argue that these summaries take content from publishers without permission, reducing traffic and revenue for original content creators. The only way for publishers to prevent this is to opt out of search engine indexing, which would damage their businesses. The senators expressed concern that AI summaries direct users to the platform displaying the summary, not to the content creators, further entrenching monopolies.
I flagged this issue back in May after Google CEO Sundar Pichai introduced AI Overviews at Google I/O (see: ), though I didn’t see the antitrust angle at the time.
What fascinates me is how quickly the AI summary threat to link-based search caught the attention of lawmakers. Four months is practically a world record in politics. Summarization is a core function of every text-to-text generative AI model; I’m not sure the FTC or antitrust laws are the right mechanisms to address this, but I'm not a lawyer.
That said, regulating AI summaries could be practically impossible, and it's unclear if regulation is even necessary. This might just be the next natural step in the evolution of the web. Or it would have been… now that U.S. legislators are trying to put their thumbs on the scale, we'll see how it goes.
As always your thoughts and comments are both welcome and encouraged. -s
P.S. While lawmakers are waking up to the idea that generative AI is going to have an impact on the way we all do business, I'm wondering: what AI apps are you using that you now can't live without? Just reply to this email.
ABOUT SHELLY PALMER
Shelly Palmer is the Professor of Advanced Media in Residence at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and CEO of The Palmer Group, a consulting practice that helps Fortune 500 companies with technology, media and marketing. Named he covers tech and business for , is a regular commentator on CNN and writes a popular . He's a , and the creator of the popular, free online course, . Follow or visit .
