AI’s shared opt-out still leaves publishers with separate bargains

Publishers are being offered one instruction for telling AI companies not to train on their journalism. The first question is what else that instruction turns off. Google’s planned implementation links a general training refusal to an existing control that also governs whether material can inform answers in Gemini Apps. Microsoft is taking a different route. A common instruction is useful progress, but it is not a common bargain. Publishers gain a simpler way to state a preference; they still carry the risk of losing useful visibility or permitting uses they meant to exclude. The decision is which uses to allow before simplifying the paperwork.

The change sits behind announcements published on 30 October by Google, Microsoft and OpenAI. A proposed shared signal would let a website state a training preference for participating providers in robots.txt, the public file through which sites communicate instructions to automated visitors. That reduces duplicated administration. It does not mean every company is already applying the instruction.

Two activities must be kept separate. Training changes what a model has learned: it helps build the model. Grounding supplies material when an answer is being produced: it helps inform a particular response. A publisher might want to refuse the first while allowing the second, especially where an answer offers a useful route back to its reporting.