Google Hit With Lawsuit Over Its Loathsome AI Overviews

Google's use of AI is an embarrassment.

Google is being sued by Chegg — yes, the barely-hanging-on company that has furnished many a college student with homework answers and cheap textbooks— over its infamously shoddy AI Overviews, Reuters reports.

In a lawsuit filed Monday, Chegg accused the tech giant of abusing its monopoly of the search engine market to pressure websites like itself into letting its content be scraped by Google's AI tools for free. The advent of AI Overviews, the company says, has turned Google from a "search engine" into an "answer engine."

And the upshot, per the lawsuit, is that by summarizing its material in the AI-powered search summaries, Google is diverting traffic away from Chegg's website and hurting its bottom line. The foundering California-based tech company laid off hundreds of employees last year, suffering a 24 percent decline in year-over-year net revenue, according to a recent company statement, with its stock barely trading above one dollar. 

"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," Chegg CEO Nathan Schultz said in the statement.

Chegg's complaints echo the concerns voiced — by itself and others — at the cusp of the AI boom with the explosion of ChatGPT. Back then, the question was whether chatbots like OpenAI's would displace search engines as the go-to way of looking up information, fundamentally changing the internet ecosystem as we know it, and hurting Google's lucrative search business, from which it earns hundreds of billions of dollars in ad revenue. 

The tables have since turned, at least somewhat. Google has gotten ahead of the potential existential threat by integrating the AI Overviews, which are turned on by default and are shown to around one billion users according to the company, into its search engine. It's further profited by integrating ads straight into the search summaries.

Almost immediately, Google's search summaries caused alarm among websites and news publishers about how they could vacuum up web traffic. As a small concession, Google began including inline links to websites cited in the summaries, making them more visible than before. However, Google reiterated that it wouldn't share any ad money with the websites whose content is cited in the AI Overviews.

All the while, little progress has been made regarding the quality of the summaries, which have been mocked for their frequent hallucinations, including the now infamous case of recommending you put glue on pizza. That was nearly a year ago; to this day is still provides a steady drip of brain-meltingly stupid answers.

Nonetheless, Google argues that its AI summaries are a positive force in the world of web search.

"With AI Overviews, people find Search more helpful and use it more, creating new opportunities for content to be discovered," a company spokesperson told Reuters. "Every day, Google sends billions of clicks to sites across the web, and AI Overviews send traffic to a greater diversity of sites."

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