Google says AI systems should be able to mine publishers' work unless companies opt out

Publishers should be able to opt out of having their works mined by generative artificial intelligence systems, according to Google, but the company has not said how such a system would work. The call for a fair use exception for AI systems is a view the company has expressed to the Australian government in the past, but the notion of an opt-out option for publishers is a new argument from Google. When asked how such a system would work, a spokesperson pointed to a recent blog post by Google where the company said it wanted a discussion around creating a community-developed web standard similar to the robots.txt Google's comments come as news companies such as News Corp have already reportedly been initiating conversations with AI companies about payment for scraping news articles. Toby Murray, associate professor at the University of Melbourne's computing and information systems school, said Google's proposal would put the onus on content creators to specify whether AI systems could absorb their content or not, but he indicated existing licensing schemes such as Creative Commons already allowed creators to mark how their works can be used.