Is the Google AI goose about to be served up for dinner?

Legal issues and threats from rival services are mounting for everyone's favourite search giant. Our man Rob has a gander at what vexes Google next.

by Rob Corbidge

Published: 15:23, 10 July 2025

In the past few days, a legal complaint lodged with the UK's Competition and Markets Authority by bodies representing news publishers has requested the CMA implement provisional measures to stop Google from misusing publisher content in AI-generated search responses.

In any sane commercial world, the move, as reported by the Press Gazette, would seem entirely reasonable and likely to be granted. 

Simply put, someone is taking stuff without paying for it and using that stuff to create their own stuff. Whether the stuff being taken is bauxite, sausages, or intellectual property is irrelevant. If that bauxite is transformed into window frames, or those sausages end up concealed deep inside a cassoulet, it doesn't matter. The original act of taking was wrong. 

Yet such is the blind momentum of technology, with the fear of missing out as its sharpest edge to cut through societal norms, that sane considerations are given equal weight to insane ones.

We won't hold our breath on the UK's CMA actually doing as requested - independent and feisty as it has been in the past - as it's notable that the current UK Government has just signed a major strategic agreement with Google for the tech business to train 100,000 of the nation's civil servants in "using AI and other digital services through its Google Cloud Training Programme by 2030" according to Computer Weekly. It's safe to assume they will all be trained on Google products.

While anything which has the prospect of improving the agility of the UK's sclerotic public sector is to be welcomed, the fact is that that issue is more cultural than technical. Too many unsackable people have been given the power to say "no", and by goodness they like to use it, regardless of tech solutions.

However, it is possible to be optimistic. There are people in public life who still regard a pluralistic and even rancorous consensus media as vital to the servicing of any democracy, one which reflects how people actually feel rather than a technology that simply siphons any and all passion out of things even as it dazzles us with circus tricks while using other people's work as props.

By way of admission of the same, Google's YouTube this week announced it will place strictures on Generative AI content, aka Degenerative AI content. According to TechCrunch, "On July 15, the company will update its YouTube Partner Program (YPP) Monetization policies with more detailed guidelines around what type of content can earn creators money and what cannot".

The wording of the rules is not yet released, but the latest YouTube policy update gives a major clue: "In order to monetize as part of the YouTube Partner Program (YPP), YouTube has always required creators to upload “original” and "authentic" content. On July 15, 2025, YouTube is updating our guidelines to better identify mass-produced and repetitious content. This update better reflects what 'inauthentic' content looks like today."

Inauthentic is the type of horrible word that such tech companies favour, having no clear definition here to define what it means other than when it suits them. What they mean is AI slop, the stolen, derivative, culled, purloined, copied and straight up cloned crap which is becoming all too present on their own platform, and will, if left unchecked, lower the quality of training data Google uses from YouTube. 

And you better believe that when it's their platform and not yours, it's a problem they care about.

We'd like to mutter something about "double standards" here as AI Overviews seemingly make irrelevant actual real views, but it would be lost on the winds of "inevitable progress". Trust me, it's all evitable really.

Meanwhile, things are a little shakier than they seem in the GenAI world. 

Google, with a stock price that reflects a degree of doubt over its ability to make good on its AI promises, may now also face a product threat from vacuous visionary Sam Altman, who is about to expand OpenAI's optimised money incinerator with a browser offering. Rivals Perplexity have launched a browser this week too.

Let them fight it out, preferably with no referee. 

At the risk of being called unhinged, even Nvidia, which this week made history by becoming the first $4 trillion company, shows signs things aren't all well. Its runaway success as the go-to chip manufacturer for AI applications is remarkable - selling quality shovels in a gold rush - yet those such as myself with longer memories remember old Nvidia as the maker of some fabulous consumer graphics cards and GPUs, including the venerable GTX1080 which purrs at the heart this author's everyday workhorse without missing a beat in nearly a decade. 

Yet, while still retaining impressive market share, Nvidia's more recent consumer GPU offerings have created a sour note around the company. It started with criticism of some dubious technical performance claims for particular models and broke out into a feud with tech channels on YouTube, one of which recently judged a hot new Nvidia GPU as "a waste of sand". Perhaps there is a loss of focus within Nvidia, even as it scales the value heights. 

The lesson from that is that publishers must keep focus on original content creation. It's the rock on which our industry is built, and it remains what makes us unique. Ignore the turbulence if you can.