Google was hit with a A$410 million fine by France’s competition watchdog, for breaches linked to EU intellectual property rules in its relationship with media outlets using their content to train its AI without permission.
The watchdog said that Google used press content to train its AI chatbot Bard (launched in 2023, and now known as Gemini) without notifying the authority or the publishers.
According to a report in the the New York Post, the watchdog confirmed that Google has pledged not to contest the facts as part of settlement proceedings, and that it also proposed several remedy measures to certain shortcomings.
Google said it accepted the settlement as it intends to focus on the larger goal of “connecting people with quality content and on working constructively with French publishers”, although it said the fine was “disproportionate”.
The New York Post report explained that the fine is linked to a copyright dispute in France over online content in a case which received complaints from some of the country’s biggest news organisations, including Agence France Presse (AFP).
The dispute appeared to be resolved in 2022 but in a statement this week, the watchdog said Google violated the terms of four out of seven commitments agreed in the settlement.
Google headquarters in California
This included conducting negotiations with publishers in good faith and providing transparent information.
According to the report, the watchdog also cited Google’s AI chatbot Bard, which it said was trained on data from unspecified media outlets and news agencies without permission.
The report says that the fine comes at a time when many publishers, writers and newsrooms seek to limit the scraping, or automatic collection of data, by AI services of their online content without their consent of fair compensation.
In 2023 The New York Times sued Microsoft and OpenAI, the creator of the popular artificial-intelligence platform ChatGPT, accusing them of using millions of the newspaper’s articles without permission to help train chatbots.
