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Google just announced its giving website publishers a way to opt out of having their data used to train the companys AI models while remaining accessible through Google Search. The new tool, called Google-Extended, allows sites to continue to get scraped and indexed by crawlers like the Googlebot while avoiding having their data used to train AI models as they develop over time.

The company says Google-Extended will let publishers manage whether their sites help improve Bardand Vertex AIgenerative APIs, adding that web publishers can use the toggle to control access to content on a site. Google confirmed in July that its training its AI chatbot, Bard, on publicly available data scraped from the web.

Google-Extended is available through robots.txt, also known as the text file that informs web crawlers whether they can access certain sites. Google notes that as AI applications expand, it will continue to explore additional machine-readable approaches to choice and control for web publishers and that it will have more to share soon.

Already, many sites have moved to block the web crawler that OpenAI uses to scrape data and train ChatGPT, including The New York Times, CNN, Reuters, and Medium. However, there have been concerns over how to block out Google. After all, websites cant close off Googles crawlers completely, or else they wont get indexed in search. This has led some sites, such as The New York Times, to legally block Google instead by updating their terms of service to ban companies from using their content to train AI.

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Google adds a switch for publishers to opt out of becoming AI training data - The Verge

Google has announced a new control in its robots.txt indexing file that would let publishers decide whether their content will "help improve Bard and Vertex AI generative APIs, including future generations of models that power those products." The control is a crawler called Google-Extended, and publishers can add it to the file in their site's documentation to tell Google not to use it for those two APIs. In its announcement, the company's vice president of "Trust" Danielle Romain said it's "heard from web publishers that they want greater choice and control over how their content is used for emerging generative AI use cases."

Romain added that Google-Extended "is an important step in providing transparency and control that we believe all providers of AI models should make available." As generative AI chatbots grow in prevalence and become more deeply integrated into search results, the way content is digested by things like Bard and Bing AI has been of concern to publishers.

While those systems may cite their sources, they do aggregate information that originates from different websites and present it to the users within the conversation. This might drastically reduce the amount of traffic going to individual outlets, which would then significantly impact things like ad revenue and entire business models.

Google said that when it comes to training AI models, the opt-outs will apply to the next generation of models for Bard and Vertex AI. Publishers looking to keep their content out of things like Search Generative Experience (SGE) should continue to use the Googlebot user agent and the NOINDEX meta tag in the robots.txt document to do so.

Romain points out that "as AI applications expand, web publishers will face the increasing complexity of managing different uses at scale." This year has seen an explosion in the development of tools based on generative AI, and with search being such a huge way people discover content, the state of the internet looks set to undergo a huge shift. Google's addition of this control is not only timely, but indicates it's thinking about the way its products will impact the web.

Update, September 28 at 5:36pm ET: This article was updated to add more information about how publishers can keep their content out of Google's search and AI results and training.

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Google will let publishers hide their content from its insatiable AI - Engadget

Madeleine Yuna Voyles plays Alphie, a pensive young robot child in The Creator. 20th Century Studios hide caption

Madeleine Yuna Voyles plays Alphie, a pensive young robot child in The Creator.

The use of AI in Hollywood has been one of the most contentious issues in the writers and actors strikes, and the industry's anxiety about the subject isn't going away anytime soon. Some of that anxiety has already started to register on-screen. A mysterious robotic entity was the big villain in the most recent Mission: Impossible film, and AI is also central to the ambitious but muddled new science-fiction drama The Creator.

Set decades into the future, the movie begins with a prologue charting the rise of artificial intelligence. Here it's represented as a race of humanoid robots that in time become powerful enough to detonate a nuclear weapon and wipe out the entire city of Los Angeles.

As a longtime LA resident who's seen his city destroyed in countless films before this one, I couldn't help but watch this latest cataclysm with a chuckle and a shrug. It's just part of the setup in a story that patches together numerous ideas from earlier, better movies. After the destruction of LA, we learn, the U.S. declared war on AI and hunted the robots to near-extinction; the few that still remain are hiding out in what is now known as New Asia.

The director Gareth Edwards, who wrote the script with Chris Weitz, has cited Blade Runner and Apocalypse Now as major influences. And indeed, there's something queasy and heavy-handed about the way Edwards evokes the Vietnam War with images of American soldiers terrorizing the poor Asian villagers whom they suspect of sheltering robots.

John David Washington plays Joshua Taylor, a world-weary ex-special-forces operative. 20th Century Studios hide caption

John David Washington plays Joshua Taylor, a world-weary ex-special-forces operative.

The protagonist is a world-weary ex-special-forces operative named Joshua Taylor, played by John David Washington. He's reluctantly joined the mission to help destroy an AI superweapon said to be capable of wiping out humanity for good. Amid the battle that ensues, Joshua manages to track down the weapon, which in a twist that echoes earlier sci-fi classics like Akira and A.I. turns out to be a pensive young robot child, played by the excellent newcomer Madeleine Yuna Voyles.

Joshua's superior, played by Allison Janney, tells him to kill the robot child, but he doesn't. Instead, he goes rogue and on the run with the child, whom he calls Alpha, or Alphie. Washington doesn't have much range or screen presence, but he and Voyles do generate enough chemistry to make you forget you're watching yet another man tag-teaming with a young girl a trope familiar from movies as different as Paper Moon and Lon: The Professional.

Joshua's betrayal is partly motivated by his grief over his long-lost love, a human woman named Maya who allied herself with the robots; she's played by an underused Gemma Chan. One of the more bothersome aspects of The Creator is the way it reflexively equates Asians with advanced technology; it's the latest troubling example of "techno-orientalism," a cultural concept that has spurred a million Blade Runner term papers.

In recycling so many spare parts, Edwards, best known for directing the Star Wars prequel Rogue One, is clearly trying to tap into our memories of great Hollywood spectacles past. To his credit, he wants to give us the kind of philosophically weighty, visually immersive science-fiction blockbuster that the studios rarely attempt anymore. The most impressive aspect of The Creator is its world building; much of the movie was shot on location in different Asian countries, and its mix of real places and futuristic design elements feels more plausible and grounded than it would have if it had been rendered exclusively in CGI.

But even the most strikingly beautiful images like the one of high-tech laser beams shimmering over a beach at sunset are tethered to a story and characters that never take on a life of their own. Not even the great Ken Watanabe can breathe much life into his role as a stern robo-warrior who does his part to help Joshua and Alphie on their journey.

In the end, Edwards mounts a sincere but soggy plea for human-robot harmony, arguing that AI isn't quite the malicious threat it might seem. That's a sweet enough sentiment, though it's also one of many reasons I left The Creator asking myself: Did an AI write this?

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'The Creator' review: This drama about AI fails to take on a life of its ... - NPR

The deal is not without its quandaries. Enforcement is an overriding one, says Daniel Gervais, a professor of intellectual property and AI law at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Figuring that out will likely set another precedent. Gervais agrees that this deal gives writers some leverage with studios, but it might not be able to stop an AI company, which may or not be based in the US, from scraping their work. August concurs, saying the WGA needs to be honest about the limitations of the contract. We made a deal with our employers, the studios, he says. We have no contractual relationship with the major AI companies. So this is not the end of the fight.

There are also questions around who carries the burden to reveal when AI has contributed some part of a script. Studios could argue that they took a script from one writer and gave it to another for rewrites without knowledge that the text had AI-generated components. As a lawyer, Im thinking, OK, so what does that mean? How do you prove that? Whats the burden? And how realistic is that?

The future implicitly hinted at by the terms of the WGA deal is one in which machines and humans work together. From an artists perspective, the agreement does not villainize AI, instead leaving the door open for continued experimentation, whether that be generating amusing names for a Tolkienesque satire or serious collaboration with more sophisticated versions of the tools in the future. This open-minded approach contrasts with some of the more hysterical reactions to these technologieshysteria thats now starting to see some pushback.

Outside Hollywood, the agreement sets a precedent for workers in many fieldsnamely, that they can and should fight to control the introduction of disruptive technologies. What, if any, precedents are set may become obvious as soon as talks resume between AMPTP and the actors union, the Screen Actors GuildAmerican Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA). Its unclear just how soon those negotiations will pick back up, but its highly likely that the guild will look to WGAs contract as a lodestar.

Still, the contract is only a determined start, says actor and director Alex Winter. He fears it won't offer expansive enough protection. Studios are putting a lot of resources into new uses for AI, he says, and they don't show signs of easing up. The writers guild deal puts a lot of trust in the studios to do the right thing, and his hope is that the SAG contract, once it's complete, will offer more protections. Similar to how our government has been allowing Big Tech topolice itselfwith AI, Winter says, I dont see that working with Big Tech and I dont see this working in the entertainment industry either, unfortunately.

Actors have stronger protections in the form of the right of publicityalso known as name, image, and likeness rightsyet intense concerns remain about synthetic actors being built from the material of actors past performances. (As of this writing, SAG-AFTRA had not responded to a request for comment.) It will also be interesting to see if any of the issues that came up during the WGAs negotiations will trickle into ongoing unionization efforts at video game studios or other tech firms. On Monday, SAG-AFTRA members authorized a strike for actors who work on video games; once again, AI was one of the issues raised.

When it comes to AI, argues Simon Johnson, an economist at MIT, the WGA has burst out in front of other unions, and everyone should take note. As he and several coauthors laid out in a recent policy memo on pro-worker AI, the history of automation teaches that workers cannot wait until management deploys these technologies; if they do, they will be replaced. (See also: the Luddites.)

We think this is exactly the right way to think about it, which is that you dont want to say no to AI, he says. You want to say the AI can be controlled and used as much as possible by workers, by the people being employed. In order to make that feasible, youre going to have to put some constraints on what employers can do with it. I think the writers are actually, in this regard, in a pretty strong position compared to other workers in the American economy.

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Hollywood Writers Reached an AI Deal That Will Rewrite History - WIRED

Google is expanding access to its generative artificial intelligence-powered search experience, or SGE, opening it up to teens aged 13 to 17, the company said Thursday in a blog post. Beginning this week, if you're between 13 and 17 and are signed in to a Google account, you can sign up for the company's Search Labs, which will include access to SGE.

"Generative AI can help younger people ask questions they couldn't typically get answered by a search engine and pose follow-up questions to help them dig deeper," the company said in the post.

According to Google, users aged 18 to 24 who currently have access to SGE "are finding this experience especially useful. They've given us particularly positive feedback about how these capabilities make it possible to search for information in a more conversational, natural way, and ask follow-up questions."

Both SGE in search and SGE while browsing can be turned on or off from the Google Search Labs home page.

From the use of the word "responsibly" in the post's headline, it's obvious that Google is aware that mixing AI and younger users could be controversial.

"As we introduce this new technology to teens, we want to strike the right balance in creating opportunities for them to benefit from all it has to offer, while also prioritizing safety and meeting their developmental needs," the post said.

It goes on to note that Google has built additional safeguards into the experience for teens.

"SGE's quality protections are designed to prevent inappropriate or harmful content from surfacing," the post reads. "For example, we've put stronger guardrails in place for outputs related to illegal or age-gated substances or bullying, among other issues. And as we gather even more feedback, we will continue to improve how our systems respond, working with experts along the way to better protect teens."

In August, Google gave its Search Generative Experience a major update in the Google App and later in the Chrome web browser. SGE can summarize web pages and also show definitions of unfamiliar words.

In July, Google was one of four leading artificial intelligence companies, including Microsoft, to launch the Frontier Model Forum, an industry group aimed at identifying best AI safety practices and promoting its responsible use.

Editors' note: CNET is using an AI engine to help create some stories. For more, seethis post.

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Google Is Expanding Its AI-Powered Search to Teens Ages 13-17 - CNET