Google proposes AI to mine online content with opt-out option

It wants to work on a community driven standard like robots.txt and has invited discussion. (Representative Image)

Google wants artificial intelligence (AI) to be able to mine all digital content unless publishers opt out. The tech behemoth has put forward this proposal in a submission to the Australian government, calling on policymakers to change current copyright laws.

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According to The Guardian, the search and hardware giant said, "copyright systems that enable appropriate and fair use of copyrighted content to enable the training of AI models in Australia on a broad and diverse range of data, while supporting workable opt-outs for entities that prefer their data not to be trained in using AI systems”.

While Google hasn't elaborated on how it expects the system to work, it pointed instead to a blog post where the company talks about working on a community driven standard like robots.txt, which web publishers use to manage how search engine crawls their data.

In the blog post, Google says, "We believe it’s time for the web and AI communities to explore additional machine-readable means for web publisher choice and control for emerging AI and research use cases".

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The post invites discussion on complementary protocols and Google wants opinions from a broad range of voice, "from across web publishers, civil society, academia and more fields from around the world to join the discussion".