An educational technology company has taken Google to court over the search engine’s artificial intelligence-generated overviews.
The edtech firm called Chegg, based in the United States (US), filed a lawsuit against Google on Monday. The company’s services include tutoring, homework assistance, and rented textbooks.
The company argues that Google’s AI-generated overviews from its website are undermining both the demand for original content and publishers’ ability to compete with the AI feature, causing Chegg financial setbacks.
Chegg claims that due to Google’s AI overviews, there has been a decrease in subscribers and visitors on its website. The company laments the feature will create a “hollowed-out information ecosystem of little use and unworthy of trust”.
According to Chegg CEO Nathan Schultz, the company is now evaluating options either for a sale or for transition to private ownership.
“Our lawsuit is about more than Chegg – it’s about the digital publishing industry, the future of internet search, and about students losing access to quality, step-by-step learning in favor of low-quality, unverified AI summaries,” Schultz says.
Google, on the other hand, has responded to the lawsuit by saying that it lacks merit.
“With AI Overviews, people find Search more helpful and use it more, creating new opportunities for content to be discovered,” a Google spokesperson says. “Every day, Google sends billions of clicks to sites across the web, and AI Overviews send traffic to a greater diversity of sites.”
A class-action lawsuit by a group of newspaper was also filed in 2023 against Google’s AI summaries. Google has asked the court to dismiss the case.
