Yesterday’s headline from Bloomberg
screamed:
“Google Seeks Licensing Talks With News
Groups, Following AI Rivals”
This "revelation" has sent ripples across the media world. Apparently, Google —
like OpenAI and Meta — now wishes to pay news publishers for training its AI
models on their content.
But this isn’t the headline that caught my attention.
My headline is different. It reads:
"A Case of 900 Million Orphans"
Who are these orphans?
They are you and I — ordinary Google users — billions of us worldwide, but
especially the 900 million+ Indians whose personal data, search history, voice
clips, face prints, location trails, and behavioral patterns fuel the machine.
We get no licensing deal. No negotiations.
No compensation. Not even consent.
While news publishers are being wooed with payments, and politicians cheer them
on (perhaps because their public profiles depend on those same media houses),
the true fuel of AI — human data — remains
unrecognized.
I said this back in February 2024, in my
blog: Rajeevji, No
Big Deal?
I warned then that governments, including ours, were trivializing the theft of data
— especially from Indian news platforms.
Now they are waking up… but only for the powerful content creators.
Ask yourself:
- Who lobbies for the school teacher in Ranchi whose YouTube history trains
YouTube’s next-gen algorithms?
- Who negotiates on behalf of the teenager in Surat whose voice prompts are
used
to improve Google Assistant?
- Who files for copyright when your Gmail habits fine-tune email summarizers?
No one.
Because you and I, dear reader, are data
orphans — used, but not counted.
And yet, Google earns billions off the
trails we leave behind every day.
So the question isn’t whether AI should license news content.
The real question is:
“When will the people who are the data — get a seat at the table?”
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