Google pressures media to agree to AI model training authorization by suspending Showcase licensing fees According to Beating monitoring, Google has recently promoted the News AI pilot project to news media and proposed new conditions. Publishers participating in the pilot must authorize content for AI model training, otherwise they will no longer be able to receive regular authorization payments after the old news cooperation project Showcase is shut down. In the past, Google paid a fixed annual fee to media through the Showcase project, displaying selected articles on pages such as Google News and directing traffic to media websites. The new AI pilot project requires media authorization of content for large-scale model training, in order to generate AI article abstracts in Google News and Gemini. Although Google claims that summaries are meant to guide users to click, with the traffic generated by Google search plummeting by nearly half, the media is generally concerned that users will only obtain information within the Google platform, leading to a complete erosion of webpage traffic. Nowadays, due to the scarcity of traffic from Google, the media's attitude has noticeably hardened. Many executives believe that the residual value brought by Google's traffic is no longer worth training Gemini robots with news content, and even consider directly banning Google's crawling. In order to implement the new agreement, Google plans to gradually shut down the old project Showcase and convert the annual fee into a signature chip for the new project. If the media agrees to AI authorization, they can continue to receive money, otherwise the cooperation fee will be completely interrupted. The Washington Post and The Guardian have joined the pilot as initial partners. But with Google's recent hardening of stance, more media are accelerating the establishment of independent subscription and registration systems, attempting to break away from dependence on Google. [Original link]