EU launches investigation into Google’s use of web content for AI

The EU has reportedly continued a probe to assess whether Google is breaching European competition rules by using online content to train its Artificial intelligence (AI) models.

The prime motive behind this revelation is to determine whether Google's methods comply with the EU’s Digital Markets Act, which seeks to assure fair competition in the digital sector.

As reported by The Guardian, the European Commission reportedly confirmed that it will examine whether the US tech company, which runs the Gemini AI model owned by Alphabet, is putting AI opponents at a "disadvantage."

The commission said that the investigation is going to examine whether Google is disrupting competition by imposing unreasonable terms on publishers and content craters, or by granting itself exclusive access to such content, consequently placing developers of rival AI models at a disadvantage.

The current development aims to scrutinize whether Google may have used content from web publishers to generate AI-powered services on its search result pages without offering publishers the option to decline such use of their content.

It has been observed that the Commission is apprehensive whether Google has used content uploaded to YouTube to provide significant training to its own generative AI models without offering any sort of compensation to the creators.

In this connection, the commission said, “Content creators uploading videos on YouTube have an obligation to grant Google permission to use their data for different purposes, including for training generative AI models.”

Nonetheless, the commission has stated that content creators uploading videos on YouTube have an obligation to grant Google permission to use their data for different purposes, including for training generative AI models.

In addition, Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet, said AI models were “prone to errors” and prompted people to use them alongside other tools.