Google's AI Is Scraping Even Sites That Ask to Be Ignored

Don't want a tech conglomerate to train its AI model on your website? Too bad — Google will do it anyway, thanks to a very convenient workaround. At least, that's more or less what the Silicon Valley behemoth just admitted to in court. As Bloomberg reports, Google said that while it does give publishers the option to opt out of large language model training done by its AI lab, DeepMind, it doesn't extend to AI efforts by other parts of the company — including the unit in charge of its dominant search engine, which has its own AI products like the much-maligned AI Overviews. The admission was made by Eli Collins, a vice president at DeepMind, when he was called as a witness during a federal antitrust trial in Washington. Diana Aguilar, a Department of Justice lawyer, grilled Collins about the glaring loophole being used to develop the company's chatbot, Gemini. "Once you take the Gemini and put it inside the search org, the search org has the ability to train on the data that publis ... Read full article.