Claude’s Chatbot and the Copyright Law: A Reflection from the Initial Testing of Google’s Use of the AI Overviews

Without the Overviews enabled, my article was often a featured link in the top of the search results, offering users a clear link to click on if they were interested in using the Claude chatbot. During my initial tests of the new search experience, the featured excerpt with the article still appeared for relevant searches, but it had been pushed beneath the answer that summarized the information from my reporting.

Jim Yu, BrightEdge’s executive chairman, thinks that the drop-off is a sign that Google has decided to be more cautious. “There’s obviously some risks they’re trying to tightly manage,” he says. Yu said that he is optimistic that the early problems with the features will be solved.

I agree with the fact that the fact-based aspect of my writing does complicate the situation, so I was not the first person to suggest focusing on your intended audience. It’s hard for me to envision a world in which the exact paragraph on Claude’s Chatbot in the AI Overview results doesn’t reference my work first.

While many AI lawsuits remain unresolved, one legal expert I spoke with who specializes in copyright law was skeptical whether I could win any hypothetical litigation. “I think you would not have a strong case for copyright infringement,” says Janet Fries, an attorney at Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath. “Copyright law, generally, is careful not to get in the way of useful things and helpful things.” Her perspective focused on the type of content in this specific example of original work, explaining that it is quite difficult to make a claim about instructional or fact-based writing, like my advice column, versus more creative work, like poetry.

Anthropic Explains Why You Need a Chatbot to Get More Click-Through Traffic from AI Overviews (and Why I’m Not Trying to Fix That)

“We see that links included in AI Overviews get more clicks than if the page had appeared as a traditional web listing for that query,” said the Google spokesperson. It’s impossible for WIRED to independently verify the impact of the feature on click-through rates because there wasn’t data to support the claim. Also, it’s worth noting that the company compared AI Overview referral traffic to more traditional blue-link traffic from Google, not to articles chosen for a featured snippet, where the rates are likely much higher.

In email exchanges and a phone call, a Google spokesperson acknowledged that the AI-generated summaries may use portions of writing directly from web pages, but they defended AI Overviews as conspicuously referencing back to the original sources. The first paragraph of the answer isn’t attributed to me. Instead, my original article was one of six footnotes hyperlinked near the bottom of the result. With source links located so far down, it’s hard to imagine any publisher receiving significant traffic in this situation.

The following screenshot on the left is from an interview I conducted with one of Anthropic’s product developers about tips for using the company’s Claude chatbot. A question about using Anthropic’s chatbot was answered in the portion of the overview that was on the right. The two paragraphs are side by side, and it seems like a classroom cheat who didn’t bother changing the wording after copying an answer from my homework.

An Artificial Intelligence Overview search result used one of my articles in an unfortunate way that made me fear for the future of journalism.