The AI Wars Have Begun, Part 1

Did You Know? OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, owns 39.4% of the AI market. Google owns 9.2%. (Source)

Happy Monday, Marketers!

Some interesting stuff happened over the weekend.

On Saturday, The New York Times published a paywalled article titled “How Tech Giants Cut Corners to Harvest Data for A.I.” which opened on how OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, allegedly trained its new Sora text-to-video model on millions of hours of transcribed YouTube videos.

It’s a good thing Sora is consuming video transcriptions. Otherwise, it wouldn’t get anything done!

Google and YouTube executives have acknowledged the allegations, but most of their responses thus far have been the usual corporate speak, like this response from YouTube CEO Neal Mohan:

This all makes sense from Google’s perspective. They see a competing company violating their terms of service to build a competing product, and they want to shut that shit down.

I’m not going to get into the legalities of all that. Google has a point. Videos published on YouTube are public-facing, but that content is owned by its creators. At least, that’s what Google will say.

And that brings us to an interesting place. A couple weeks ago, we discussed the potential impacts of Google’s new AI Overview feature coming to a SERP near you.

Essentially, Google is rolling out a new search feature that provides an AI-generated response at the top of page 1. Google will claim this new feature is all about a better experience for the user, and maybe that’s true for many users.

But Google is a for-profit company whose executives have a responsibility to manage the company in the best interests of its shareholders.

In other words…

Google’s decisions only align with the best interests of its users in 3 situations:

1. When doing otherwise would lead to bad PR that could hurt financial performance (today called, '“getting canceled”).

2. When doing otherwise presents legal or compliance risks.

3. When the best interests of Google and its users conveniently overlap out of pure happenstance.

That’s how pretty much all publicly traded, for-profit companies operate.

Now, where does Google get the content published in their new AI Overviews? It’s written by their proprietary AI model, but there are all sorts of legal and ethical gray areas Google is exploiting.

• Does Google’s AI model actually create the content, or does it rewrite content that other people have created?

• How does Google train their model to publish accurate AI Overviews tailored to individual search queries?

Let’s explore those questions separately. Today, we’ll tackle the first.

Does Google’s AI model actually create content?

This question—whether AI models actually create content or simply rewrite it—is pretty fascinating, at least to me.

It’s easy to say, “That’s our content and Google is stealing or plagiarizing it!” which may be true.

But how is that different than the process used by a content creator tasked with publishing a new article or blog post? Doesn’t that content creator type queries into Google, read the top results, compile information, and synthesize a new piece of content aggregating all of that information? An article that they own? That they created?

If so, how is Google’s AI model—or any generative AI model, for that matter—really any different, aside from the scale at which it works?

One wrinkle I find especially interesting is how Google is vastly different today than even just a few years ago before generative AI, led by ChatGPT, really took off.

Back then, Google was merely the platform that connected searchers with publishers who had answers to their questions. Those were simpler times.

Today, Google is both a platform and a competitor. Not only is Google the place connecting searchers and publishers—they have become publishers themselves.

Google right now…

As a content creator myself, it definitely doesn’t feel right that Google is using other people’s content to create and promote its own content, but I recognize there’s a little hypocrisy in there.

I also recognize that we’ve entered a new era of human history, and now we need to deal with these types of ambiguities that previous generations couldn’t conceptualize.

Everyone say, “Hi!” to Samantha W 👋

Question: What’s the most random fact you know?

Samantha W’s Answer: “A shrimp’s heart is in its head!”

ChatGPT-Generated Stolen Joke of the Day 🤣

What did one hat say to the other hat?

You stay here, I'll go on ahead!

Suggest a topic for a future edition 🤔

Got an idea for a topic I can cover? Or maybe you’re struggling with a specific marketing-related problem that you’d like me to address?

Just reply to this email and describe the topic.

There's no guarantee I'll use your suggestion, but I read and reply to everyone, so have at it!