Google is on a collision course with regulators over search. If they are seen to be taking yet more content and knowledge from websites and "republishing" it they are going to find themselves with large fines and sanctions.
I think they are too "big" to really push AI, it needs smaller companies willing to take a higher risk.
It's an interesting conundrum because facts aren't copyrightable, but in a world with intelligent language models that can ingest facts and spit them back out in whatever phrasing or format is most useful to the user, facts are also the only valuable part of such websites.
On the flip side, trying to make facts copyrightable seems like a terrible idea for all sorts of reasons. For example, if facts were copyrightable, that would make online discussion of factual stories illegal, since it's hard to discuss a fact without revealing what it is. Also, it's not always clear who should get "credit" for a fact, since facts are by their very nature true independent of who first reported them.
Maybe journalism will eventually become similar to academia, where journalists are funded by governments and large corporations who have an interest in learning, and the resulting discoveries are (ideally) made freely available for everyone to access?
Fair. Moreover, what are search or even content websites for if Google gobble up all that knowledge and distil it out.
But with China, Russia and India lurking, perhaps Congress might drag their feet on reigning AI in. Google Cloud are now poised to be going for some pretty decent govt contracts.
I think they are too "big" to really push AI, it needs smaller companies willing to take a higher risk.