Google’s foray into AI-generated journalism — and maybe-possibly destroying the already-teetering media industry along the way — continues. Adweek reports that Google is paying a select group of publishers to quietly test a secretive generative AI platform designed to produce news articles. Per the agreement, Adweek writes, “the publishers are expected to use the suite of tools to produce a fixed volume of content for 12 months” in exchange for a “monthly stipend amounting to a five-figure sum annually.” According to Adweek, the in-beta AI tool allows “under-resourced publishers” to “create aggregated content more efficiently by indexing recently published reports generated by other organizations, like government agencies and neighboring news outlets, and then summarizing and publishing them as a new article.” In other words, it sounds an awful lot like the AI program is explicitly designed to vacuum up the work of other news providers and recapitulate it into new material for publishing — and paying struggling publishers chump change to promote it. In a statement to Adweek, Google claimed that the effort is still in its “early stages” and defended the AI as a way to “help” news organizations, “especially smaller publishers.” But backdropped by its efforts to integrate journalism-regurgitating AI into its Search algorithms — which are simultaneously eroding due to the increasing online ubiquity of poor-quality AI-generated content — the tool feels much less like a means of helping the limping journalism industry along, and much more like yet another AI-generated nail in its coffin. According to Adweek’s report, Google specifically…Google Quietly Paying Journalists to Generate Articles Using Unreleased AI