Every published Top AI Stories item tagged with Publishing, newest first.
After two days of criticism, Meta removed a clause from its commercial terms that said it could use any content from the websites tied to a business account to develop and train its products. Legal scholars, including Cornell's James Grimmelmann, had read it as a way to train on news sites for free and override their robots.txt blocks. Meta said the crawling terms only ever applied to its ads and business products, and that robots.txt still governs how its crawlers behave. "These updates don't give us new rights that supersede those preferences," spokesperson Daniel Roberts told The Verge.
From October 30, any company that keeps using a Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp business account agrees to let Meta crawl the websites "associated with" that account and use the content to train its products, Nieman Lab reported. Nearly every news organization runs such an account. Three legal experts who reviewed the language said it could be read as permission to train Meta's AI on publishers' work, and possibly to serve that work back in competition with them. There is no opt-out short of abandoning the business tools. Meta said the update only consolidates crawling language from older terms, will not change how it crawls, and that robots.txt still governs access. The experts said the new terms could be used to argue they override it.
Asked for a "New Yorker-style cartoon," ChatGPT often adds the signature of a real cartoonist, Nieman Lab's Andrew Deck reports. He documented more than 15 New Yorker contributors whose pen names appeared on AI images, including Brendan Loper, whose signature sat on a viral cartoon about Dolly Parton that he never drew. "My name is my name," Loper said. "It felt very much like a violation of my personhood." After Nieman Lab contacted OpenAI, ChatGPT began warning that some such requests may break its rules on similarity to third-party content, but it still signed some cartoons with real names. The New Yorker's owner, Condé Nast, has a licensing deal with OpenAI, but a spokesperson said it has never allowed an AI company to train on the cartoons.
A US federal judge has dismissed antitrust lawsuits from Chegg and from Penske Media, the owner of Rolling Stone and Variety, which argued that Google's AI Overviews take their content and their traffic. Judge Amit Mehta, who ruled in the Justice Department's case that Google had broken antitrust law in search, wrote that publishers had only an "expectation" of search traffic, and that "an expectation is not an agreement." He said he was not unsympathetic to creators whose work Google "takes and repurposes without compensation," but that the remedy is for lawmakers. The ruling is separate from Google's small pilot that pays some publishers for AI answers.
Google has admitted about 100 publishers to a pilot that pays them when their content materially contributes to AI Overviews and other Gemini-powered search answers. Several small and mid-sized sites told The Information the payments come to roughly one-tenth of one percent of their advertising revenue. One early participant is on track for more than $1 million a year, while several smaller sites earned less than $1,000 over several months. Some larger publishers have declined to join in hopes of a better deal, and publishers say it is unclear what counts as a meaningful contribution.
Defending copyright claims from The New York Times and from book authors, Microsoft says it gave the publishers' expert 8.2 million Copilot chat logs, picked because they hit keywords most likely to surface the plaintiffs' work. Of those, 59,545 shared at least sixteen words with news content, and just 24 responses matched thirty or more words from a book, with only ten of 212 books matching at all. The Times rejects the conclusions. Reproduction is the harm these cases turn on, so the scale of it is the argument.