Content Aware media news: July 4, 2024

Google's wobbly sandcastle, ChatGPT on the sauce, and more insight into AI Overviews - all in this week's Content Aware.

Published: 15:26, 04 July 2024

Shaky ground for Google's Sandbox
Google's attempt to divert the railroad into its garden yet more, via its Privacy Sandbox initiative to replace third-party cookies, comes under greater scrutiny after new research forecast a 60% decline in programmatic ad income for publishers and others.
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CSI: AWS
Drama continues from allegations that Perplexity AI has been bypassing robots.txt instructions and cribbing content from major news outlets. Added spice was thrown into the dish when it was revealed Amazon Web Services has launched an investigation into the start-up for violating scraping rules.
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ChatGPT's 404 madness
Nieman Lab's testing shows ChatGPT frequently hallucinates fake URLs when prompted to link to articles even from OpenAI's partnered publications, calling into question OpenAI's ability to deliver on its commitments to news media partners.
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Government backs Kiwi media
New Zealand's government looks westward to Australia and its digital bargaining code, and pledges to push ahead with a similar framework for the island nation for social and search companies to share revenue made from content to those who created it.
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How to: Google's AI Overview
A deep-deep-dive into Google's AI Overview search results - how it works and what the effects look like being. Interesting snippet: AI Overviews do not seem to generate results based on a (for example) the content found at a publisher's page. In fact, it seems to generate the response first, and then simply look for a link that backs it up - and probably weight the result on a commercial scale.
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AI plagiarism described
WIRED's Reece Rogers shows the widespread plagiarism and low-quality AI-generated content which is increasingly populating search, with the example of a spam site copying from sources like his own WIRED and TechCrunch in multiple languages.
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Video strategy optimisation
More digging into the Google Search API leak, looking at how it impacts video.
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バイバイ floppy disks
In one of the better examples of technology comprehensively outpacing bureaucracy, floppy disks have finally waved the white flag in Japan and are no longer a requisite to submit vast numbers of official documents to authorities. (Next thing, they'll be telling me my telex is under threat! -Ed).
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