Google is Pitching an AI Tool to New Organizations to Automate Article Writing

Isn't this just an enterprise application of Google SGE or Bard?

The New York Times reported that Google is pitching media publishers on a new generative AI tool that will automatically write news stories. According to the Times:

Google is testing a product that uses artificial intelligence technology to produce news stories, pitching it to news organizations including The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal’s owner, News Corp, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The tool, known internally by the working title Genesis, can take in information — details of current events, for example — and generate news content, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the product.

One of the three people familiar with the product said that Google believed it could serve as a kind of personal assistant for journalists, automating some tasks to free up time for others, and that the company saw it as responsible technology that could help steer the publishing industry away from the pitfalls of generative A.I.

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Jenn Crider, a Google spokeswoman, said in a statement that “in partnership with news publishers, especially smaller publishers, we’re in the earliest stages of exploring ideas to potentially provide A.I.-enabled tools to help their journalists with their work.”

The Copilot for Journalists Already Exists

“A personal assistant for journalists,” is a potential description for any of the internet-connected generative AI chatbots. You could also call them personal assistants for students and teachers, marketers, and a variety of others.

Bard, Bing Chat, and Perplexity all provide features that streamline research tasks. They can aggregate information and summarize data. Anthropic and ChatGPT can also perform summarization tasks. And they can all write. These are the types of labor-intensive tasks that can benefit journalists.

If Google is pitching a generative AI copilot for journalists, it may just be offering a tool that is similar to what many journalists are already using. The purported product could also have additional features, such as providing usage visibility to editors and publishers. Set aside the debate on whether news organizations should employ generative AI tools for a moment. If they do want journalists to employ these tools, what is the rationale for paying Google for the privilege?

However…

Google News

News publishers have a love-hate relationship with Google. Search is an important source of website visitor traffic. Google is also a competitor for those news readers through its Google News aggregation service. Google is also using news archives on the web to train its large language models (LLMs). Using that information through Bard for historical research or in combination with solutions such as Google Search Generative Experience (SGE) could mean fewer visitors to news sites since

A reason publishers may consider a Google offering in this genre is if a promise of better search rankings accompanies it. Many news stories are undifferentiated in terms of content. In those cases, a higher ranking in Google search may be the differentiation.

Beyond ethical and policy considerations, a reason publishers may avoid such a tool is a concern that Google News may become a competitor, and you don’t want to teach your competitor how to perform tasks effectively.

If instead of publishing links to top new organizations related to search queries, Google News could start promoting its own stories and steering search users to those articles. The result could be devasting to some news organizations. This was not a viable option for Google in the past, but generative AI tools make this scenario plausible today.

The offer of an AI writing assistant for news publishers is not novel. Automated Insights has done this for the Associated Press and other media outlets for years. What is new is that LLM-backed solutions can be applied to a much wider variety of topics.