TECH NEWS – The company can afford it, but it sounds scary.

Google has launched a pilot program that gives independent websites access to a beta version of its artificial intelligence that can write news stories. We heard about this last year when Google was testing an AI tool called Genesis. Genesis is capable of writing news stories, and now it seems that the US tech company is charging small publishers five figures to write articles with its generative AI.

The test is small in scale, but requires frequent use: sites participating in the test must publish an AI-written article three times a day, plus a weekly newsletter and a monthly marketing campaign. Google will take the content from the sites and put it on a dashboard, then a human editor can use the AI tools to turn the content into a news story and fine-tune the article before it is published. Participants are required to publish for a year, with analytics and feedback going to Google on a regular basis. Strangely, they don’t have to indicate that it’s AI-written content, nor does Google notify the sites they’re harvesting content from that they’re doing so…

Google CEO Sundar Pichai sent out an internal email on Tuesday about the unacceptable bug in Gemini and how the company is trying to fix it: “I want to address the recent issues with problematic text and image responses in the Gemini (formerly Bard) app. I know that some of the responses offended our users and showed bias – to be clear, that’s completely unacceptable and we got it wrong. Our mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful is sacrosanct. We’ve always tried to provide users with helpful, accurate, and unbiased information in our products. That’s why people trust them. This must be our approach for all our products, including our emerging AI products.

We’ll be driving a clear set of actions, including structural changes, updated product policies, improved launch processes, robust reviews and red-teaming, and technical recommendations. We are looking at all of this and making the necessary changes. We’re already seeing significant improvement in a number of areas. No Al is perfect, especially at this nascent stage of the industry’s development, but we know the bar is high for us, and we will keep at it for as long as it takes. And we’ll review what happened and make sure we fix it at scale,” Pichai wrote.

At least they are taking responsibility.

Source: WCCFTech, WCCFTech, Adweek, Semafor