Google might start charging for access to search results that use generative artificial intelligence tools. That’s according to a new Financial Times report citing “three people with knowledge of [Google’s] plans.”
Charging for any part of the search engine at the core of its business would be a first for Google, which has funded its search product solely with ads since 2000. But it’s far from the first time Google would charge for AI enhancements in general; the “AI Premium” tier of a Google One subscription costs $10 more per month than a standard “Premium” plan, for instance, while “Gemini Business” adds $20 a month to a standard Google Workspace subscription.
While those paid products offer access to Google’s high-end “Gemini Advanced” AI model, Google also offers free access to its less performant, plain “Gemini” model without any kind of paid subscription.
If I have to pay for Google, I’d rather pay Kagi.
Paying for the privilege of using AI to sift through the vast bleak sea of AI generated garbage. What a time to be alive!
Oh no, if I don’t give them money, I won’t get LLM enshitification? The horror!
Imagine me paying to give my data to feed their info beast. No thanks. I can run my own AI tools.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Google might start charging for access to search results that use generative artificial intelligence tools.
While those paid products offer access to Google’s high-end “Gemini Advanced” AI model, Google also offers free access to its less performant, plain “Gemini” model without any kind of paid subscription.
“SGE never feels like a useful addition to Google Search,” Ars’ Ron Amadeo wrote last month.
Regardless, the current tech industry mania surrounding anything and everything related to generative AI may make Google feel it has to integrate the technology into some sort of “premium” search product sooner rather than later.
Last month, the company announced it was redoubling its efforts to limit the appearance of “spammy, low-quality content”—much of it generated by AI chatbots—in its search results.
In February, Google shut down the image generation features of its Gemini AI model after the service was found inserting historically inaccurate examples of racial diversity into some of its prompt responses.
The original article contains 323 words, the summary contains 156 words. Saved 52%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Probably because they haven’t figured out a way to tie Ad-sense to an AI engine.
Who is Google?
Once upon a time, in the vast land of the Internet, there was a magical library known as the Web. The library had many librarians, but a wise old owl by the name of Google was the most popular one. Everyone in the kingdom of knowledge loved him. People asked him questions, and Google gave them the answers. Life was good.
However, in the dark corners of the Internet, in the swamps of greed, there lurked an evil litch queen Seo. She only wanted to watch the world burn, and so she cast an evil curse on Google. The curse of Seo made Google give completely wrong answer. As chaos, ignorance and lies spread cross the land, queen Seo laughed in her castle.
The end.
Good night, sweet dreams.
I think this lets Google off the hook. I think Google wanted to be the only librarian because Google was jealous of the other librarians, so they went to the swamp of greed and negotiated with the evil queen.
Had to leave out so much from this version. Maybe there should be a director’s cut, part 2 or something. 😁
Would love to see Google do pay to play for this instead of devious pay with your usage data and ads (although likely they will do both)
The largest number in the world isn’t big enough to describe the % chance they double dip. Ironically I think the 2nd largest numbers are called googols, after grahams number, IIRC.
I don’t even want those features for free, why would I pay for it? lol
Oh thank god, I’ll be able to avoid seeing it by just not paying.
