The European Commission has opened an antitrust investigation into whether Google has breached European Union (EU) competition rules over content used for artificial intelligence (AI) purposes.
The EU’s executive branch said in a statement dated Dec. 8 that it will examine whether Google used the content of web publishers for its search engine’s AI-powered services, AI Overview and AI Mode, without adequately compensating publishers or without giving them the option to refuse the use of their content.
AI Overview generates summaries of a topic prompted by a user typing a query into the search engine, and they appear above the relevant results. AI Mode is a search feature that generates conversational responses to search queries, similar to a chatbot….