News companies have been warned of a “devastating impact” on online audiences as search results are replaced by AI summaries, after a new study claimed it caused up to 80% fewer clickthroughs. The threat posed by Google’s AI Overviews, which summarise a search result with a block of text, has rapidly risen to the top of the concerns among media owners. Some regard it as an existential threat to outlets reliant on search result traffic.
Source: AI summaries cause ‘devastating’ drop in audiences, online news media told
In a court filing Thursday, Microsoft argued that the current version of its Copilot AI assistant for consumers should be excluded from the process of legal discovery — opposing an effort by the plaintiffs to require the team behind the product to turn over documents and materials deemed relevant to the case. But lawyers for the news organizations contend that Copilot is powered by the same core AI systems, performing the same functions, with the same alleged harms.
Within two weeks, Mallal, who directed Spiders in the Sky on his own, was able to make a film about the Ukraine attack that would have cost millions – and would have taken at least two years including development – to make pre-AI. “Using AI, it should be possible to make things that we’ve never seen before,” he said. “We’ve never seen a cinematic news piece before turned around in two weeks. We’ve never seen a thriller based on the news made in two weeks.”
