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The Courts AI Google

Google's AI Previews Erode the Internet, Edtech Company Says In Lawsuit (reuters.com) 37

Posted by BeauHD from the hollowed-out dept.
Chegg has filed a lawsuit against Google, accusing the tech giant of using AI-generated overviews to undermine publishers by reducing site traffic and eroding financial incentives for original content. Chegg claims this practice violates antitrust laws and threatens the integrity of the online information ecosystem. Reuters reports: This will eventually lead to a "hollowed-out information ecosystem of little use and unworthy of trust," the company said. The Santa Clara, California-based company has said Google's AI overviews have caused a drop in visitors and subscribers. Chegg was trading at around $1.63 on Monday, down more than 98% from its peak price in 2021.

The company announced it would lay off 21% of its staff in November. Nathan Schultz, CEO of Chegg, said on Monday that Google is profiting off the company's content for free. "Our lawsuit is about more than Chegg -- it's about the digital publishing industry, the future of internet search, and about students losing access to quality, step-by-step learning in favor of low-quality, unverified AI summaries," he said.

Publishers allow Google to crawl their websites to generate search results, which Google monetizes through advertising. In exchange, the publishers receive search traffic to their sites when users click on the results, Chegg said. But Google has started coercing publishers to let it use the information for AI overviews and other features that result in fewer site visitors, the company said. Chegg argued the conduct violates a law against conditioning the sale of one product on the customer selling or giving its supplier another product.

Google's AI Previews Erode the Internet, Edtech Company Says In Lawsuit More | Reply

Google's AI Previews Erode the Internet, Edtech Company Says In Lawsuit

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  • Yes, but what do (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Morromist ( 1207276 ) on Monday February 24, 2025 @08:10PM (#65192839)

    He's probably right - the history of the internet over the last decade has been about harvesting other people's digital work for your own profit, especially if you're google.

    but what Is he expecting - someone to do something about it?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by allo ( 1728082 )

      He could add Google to the robots.txt. Or does he want to have his cake and eat it too?

    • google provides a service. without them nobody would even know about his shit little rent seeking business. It's not incumbent upon google to make sure that Chegg is the only place people go when they want information. talk about a 'get off my lawn' moment!

  • Chegg's business is student cheating (Score:5, Informative)

    by dcollins ( 135727 ) on Monday February 24, 2025 @08:45PM (#65192903) Homepage

    Chegg is one of the scummiest companies out there.

    Their absurd spike in COVID was entirely due to their business model being to help students cheat at homework and exams, which became enormously easier to pull off when all teaching and testing was online. The amount of time that college professors spent trying to mitigate and pursue Chegg-cheating for a few years was enormous.

    What they're mad about is that ChatGPT has scooped them as the easier, and free, go-to method for academic cheating. Hence the 99% stock price drop. It's actually quite similar to the SCO-Linux disputes: shithole company files last-gasp nonsense lawsuits just as it circles the drain.

    Since ChatGPT’s launch, Chegg has lost more than half a million subscribers who pay up to $19.95 a month for prewritten answers to textbook questions and on-demand help from experts. Its stock is down 99% from early 2021, erasing some $14.5 billion of market value. Bond traders have doubts the company will continue bringing in enough cash to pay its debts.

    Wall Street Journal via MSN [msn.com]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by habig ( 12787 )

      Don't have mod points to day, but... this! ^^^^^^^^^

      Company whose business model is cheating publishers and professors out of their IP, gets salty when a search engine doesn't get them click-thrus to their pirated cheating-for-hire scheme? Irony isn't dead after all.

    • It's actually quite similar to the SCO-Linux disputes: shithole company files last-gasp nonsense lawsuits just as it circles the drain.

      Is it really? In this case, it sounds to me like the lawsuit is basically legitimate, at least insofar as it points to the wrongdoing of the LLM corporations. Now, maybe in a moral sense when it comes to plagiarism, they should be co-defendants rather than plaintiffs; but that doesn't mean that their case doesn't look like it has some prima facie merits. (IANAL &c., so

    • Well after reading your post I really want them both to lose.

      At least they have to pay a lot of money to fight each other so that's something.

    • They may well be scumbags (I'd never heard of them before today), but they may have a point.

      There have been numerous cases brought against Google that the snippets were enough content that people weren't clicking the links, and so apparently that was stopping people visiting news sites and what have you. I personally can't see it, but a few courts at least entertained the idea, and in some cases agreed.

      The AI summaries are essentially paraphrasing the actual websites in the search results. You and I might n

  • It isn't the programmer bros that lose their jobs first to AI. It is the millions of websites that have been and will be going out of business due to "No Referral Google".

    We bought into "sure, use our content for the chance as some traffic" for the last two decades. Now Google has changed that paradigm and is no longer keeping up their end of the bargian. Click through rates are dropping 10% month-over-month. They are 50% of what they where a year ago.

    There are going to be some big sites tee off on Goo

  • 'erode the internet' (Score:3)

    by ZipNada ( 10152669 ) on Monday February 24, 2025 @09:18PM (#65192953)

    Regardless of the legal merits of the suit or the company, they do make an interesting point. If I license you to scrape my ever-changing popular news site and offer up summaries of it, it does seem like fewer people will visit my site. Less eyeballs for me means less ad revenue etc. Already you can get AI summaries of national news of the day, and it may be that people will come to rely on that instead of the original material.

    And so eventually, where does that original material come from? Less money available for humans to generate it, and an erosion of new information available on the internet.

    And then there are the mistakes and misinterpretations from your machine intermediary to worry about.
    https://www.msn.com/en-us/news... [msn.com]

  • We boomers/gen xers are producing the systems so that a generation of 'students' who are paying big money to be educatedare learning very little. I'll admit that AI is not the solution but the sooner that these money grabbing cheats are out of business the better. In my perfect world, no screens at school until 16, no screens at home until you have moved out.

    • sorry, Chegg aren't cheats, they are cheat enablers.

    • Your perfect world unfortunately creates kids poorly adapted for dealing with the real world. Screens are everywhere. Learning how to incorporate the technology with appropriate boundaries and limits is a far better strategy.
  • I rarely use Google, and only for generic and idle questions, but I find the AI summaries interesting, and about half of the time i click on a webpage or two to verify the information. The AI seems to give good and complete answers. Kudos, and it seems like a good direction to go.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dan667 ( 564390 )
      google's AI summaries periodically get stuff wrong. I stopped trusting them. I have noticed I have started to ignore them more and click through to the website as you then get some context to whether the information is good or not. I would not be surprised if people are acting on these summaries and it is causing problems due to bad info.
      • " google's AI summaries periodically get stuff wrong. I stopped trusting them. I have noticed I have started to ignore them more and click through to the website as you then get some context to whether the information is good or not. I would not be surprised if people are acting on these summaries and it is causing problems due to bad info." I understand this point of view, The AI is good, until it is not.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by allo ( 1728082 )

          Google's summaries pick up bad search results. All the popular "Gotcha" moments that made news were Google summarizing satire and shitposts. The problem is, that the summary didn't say "According to redditor shitposter6234 ..." but presented it as something that newbies could interpret as Google's knowledge. Wait until SEO spammers start to game the system and get some popcorn.

          • It does seem like a "buyer beware" situation, and a person should be discriminating. It also seems like google is once again: "eating someone else's lunch". I find myself discriminating, where I think I know BS when I see it, then there are credible and non-credible links that follow, and I have to have the common sense to click on the credible ones to find the information I wanted.

  • They may erode all incentives for creativity, but they do so by stealing.

  • (at least the business part of it) has been eroding for years, even decades now. But we're now at the stage where rats, fighting for the scraps that have still left, step on each other's turf. There will be many victims in the process.

  • Why aren't we discussing the much more important fact, which is that the AI-generated answers and previews are often just plain wrong. We should *not* be accepting this. Google needs to turn it off, and some disclaimer should hardly be effective legal protection for this. They *know* it generates incorrect information.

  • I don't think he's always right about every little thing, but he is smart enough to see things the vast majority either ignore, or shrug off as unimportant and speaks his mind about them. His current thoughts on what's happening with the Internet as a whole, and with the AI summarization of it in particular, is that ultimately it will be a good thing. It will slowly lead to people no longer trusting their devices to be the ultimate authority on information, and to stop trusting the Internet as the arbiter o

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