Education tech firm sues Google over AI search summaries

Company's CEO says Google AI overviews serve to keep users on Google.

See full article...

 

[Castellum Excors]

I wonder which is greater, the hate of AI or the hate towards a company that thrives on cheating and exploitation of people in other countries. Personally, I prefer the whole "why not both" meme, but the votes here on Ars should be interesting.

 

[Fatesrider]

Not that I'm a Google defender per se but this seems like chegg is suing because Google built a better product?

Google's business is selling advertisement.

Chegg's was selling access to information

AI altered the landscape a lot about what was what out there, but Google was never about "information" until AI showed up. With its dominant market position, providing a new service, regardless of how large or small other folks providing that service before Google started to are going to be impacted.

So, by my read, this is an antitrust complaint, and given the nature of the complaint, I'd think it's a valid one.

After all if you weren't competing with a company before, and suddenly find your business falling off a cliff because someone new came along an started something new and directly competitive in an utterly dominant way, it could well be an antitrust thing, and not so much a "your product is better than mine!" thing.

Google could have the superior product, but its market position is going to eclipse any other AI summary service doing that right in the revenue stream to such a degree that they may be considered breaking trust.

If it wasn't being distributed by Google basically for free, and was another dedicated business which had not previously competed, I'd be thinking "butthurt" vs "antitrust", too. But it being Google makes it much more an antitrust thing, especially when Google wasn't doing that before.

 

[RuralNinja]

I feel a certain way about a cheating website complaining about getting cheated. Also, unless they can show that Google is doing objectively illegal, their case seems flimsy to me. If students search for exam answers, and they get them from Google instead of Chegg, that isn't inherently illegal, unless they can prove Google is illegally sourcing the answers.

 

[Stuart Frasier]

Somebody is clicking on them, hence why the whole thing has allowed shit like facebook and twitter to be billion dollar companies. I also don’t know who is clicking online ads, but I guess ‘impressions’ count too

I wonder how much ad “traffic” is bots now.

 

[NeutrinoSunset]

Why not tell us what Chegg actually do and how this impacts them! I read the entire article and still had no idea by the end.

 

[Emon]

What's even worse is that people now unironically trust AIs to give them "legitimate" answers. When asked for evidence of a claim, people will screenshot Google AI results and present them as impregnable facts, never mind that the next three results often disprove the findings of the AI.

I frequently see people using LLM results as "proof" and their "proof" that it can be trusted is, "it provides sources now." They don't understand that doesn't mean it understands the sources and don't understand it doesn't make it trustworthy. No one bothers reading or understanding sources to begin with and now it's worse.

 

[pidgin8]

But isn't this just competition? Is a search engine directing traffic to your website a fundamental right?

It would be “just competition” if Google had setup a dedicated page where people need to go to use Gemini. By integrating their search platform (where Google has a monopoly on the market), Google makes it impossible to compete on fair terms. In addition, Google is trying to be both content creator with Gemini and a “gateway to content” by third parties, also leveraging their position to make decisions that favour their ad revenue rather than optimise access to information.

So it’s not just companies like Chegg that are impacted, we the people who need to use search or access content are also at a disadvantage.

Mega corps should not be allowed to exist.

 

[Neutral Ion]

Couldn't have happened to a nicer company

I hated how Chegg would buy bibliography websites (EasyBib, CitationMachine) and then fill those websites with ads and charge a subscription. For a citation website! They were my first exposure to ensh*ttifcation.

 

[mrkite77]

Not that I'm a Google defender per se but this seems like chegg is suing because Google built a better product?

By stealing the content from everyone.

 

[mrkite77]

I don't think I've ever clicked an online ad, let alone bought a product that way. It's funny to think that companies are fighting over my clicks and views when these "impressions" do not actually make them any money.

Except you were definitely influenced by ads... when you need to get a vpn, the thousands of nord vpn ads you've seen make it more likely you'll go there first.

 

[bugsbony]

Regardless of Chegg or Google, this could be a real problem in the future for ad supported websites.

Eventually, as AIs (local or not) get better and more widely used, I guess people will just ask their AI bots to lookup websites, be it for summaries of one or many websites, to find an answer to a particular question, or just to read it the way they want and with no ads. Or even some kind of AI-enabled web browser should be able to hide the ads if you just ask it to. It's not something you can stop, if you can read a website, an AI bot can too. Then again, adblockers are already a thing.

 

[daveok]

Probably because it's a republished article from the Financial Times.

Good point!

 

[Tonkaman]

Google's business is selling advertisement.

Chegg's was selling access to information

AI altered the landscape a lot about what was what out there, but Google was never about "information" until AI showed up. With its dominant market position, providing a new service, regardless of how large or small other folks providing that service before Google started to are going to be impacted.

So, by my read, this is an antitrust complaint, and given the nature of the complaint, I'd think it's a valid one.

After all if you weren't competing with a company before, and suddenly find your business falling off a cliff because someone new came along an started something new and directly competitive in an utterly dominant way, it could well be an antitrust thing, and not so much a "your product is better than mine!" thing.

Google could have the superior product, but its market position is going to eclipse any other AI summary service doing that right in the revenue stream to such a degree that they may be considered breaking trust.

If it wasn't being distributed by Google basically for free, and was another dedicated business which had not previously competed, I'd be thinking "butthurt" vs "antitrust", too. But it being Google makes it much more an antitrust thing, especially when Google wasn't doing that before.

There's also the fact that the new competitor built its business by scraping your data and your intellectual property to then display as their own.

 

[pemmet]

This has only gotten more and more fascinating as I've read through the comments-

On one hand, the text of the complaint looks like a great argument from the perspective of a non-lawyer who hasn't seen Google's rebuttal.

On the other hand, the issue of the Chegg's business model makes this feel more like a case of the thief who slipped on the ice of the unsalted walkway at the home he just burgled.

So we've got google peering at Medusa thru a mirror hoping that counts as 'not-legally-looking' while Medusa gets a degree in Academic Dishonesty. I'm sooooooooooo glad I'm not in school anymore because these are some next-level complications!!

 

[Don Reba]

Could not happen to a nicer company.

 

[guevera]

The biggest issue with this is that Google will punish you for blocking it's generative AI scraper via robots.txt. The company says it won't affect your actual search rank (there are mixed reports about the truth of this...) but it will prevent you from showing up in things like discover and other "enhancements" that take up more and more of the page. This is straight abusive monopoly shit straight out of the Standard Oil or 1880s railroad playbook. Google needs to be broken up.

 

[mprogers]

Chegg is a site for students who want to cheat, hurting those students in the long term. They also encourage the theft of intellectual property created by instructors. I don't feel sorry for them in the slightest.

 

[irnoob]

Link to the case, for those like me who are inclined to read the actual complaint: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69668109/chegg-inc-v-google-llc/

It would be nice if more news outlets would make an effort to do this (or at least give a case number).

That would require effort. Very few journalists are of the caliber we find in this site.

 

[jgee43]

That fucking phrase will literally be the death of the planet, I yearn for when that's not a thing, and I say that as someone who's got a fucking shit pot of money in stock. Long term company health far superior to quarter-by-quarter shortsightedness.


Chegg started out as a textbook rental company, not a clue what they have evolved into, but they saved me a great deal of money when I was going back to college.

They mostly evolved into facilitating homework cheating while displaying ads. (I mean...providing "homework helps".)

While I'm not a fan of Chegg, this is pretty clearly Google abusing its position and stealing content to me. But I'm not a lawyer, so once it hits a courtroom? I dunno.

 

[TheThirdDictor]

In other news, Amtrak sues Delta Airlines because Delta Airlines makes the travel experience better, and people prefer flying for 3 hours versus 19 hours on a train.

 

[RickRoyLeonPrisZhoraRacha]

STOP The Google AI search results by preceding your search words with... fuck.

 

[DCStone]

Did they in fact build a better product

View attachment 103525

I dropped that search into DDG, and it appears that the AI overview is regurgitating this April 1st post:

https://www.hivesystems.com/blog/this-major-vulnerability-could-fill-your-computer-with-bees

More interestingly, though, this gem cropped up as well:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/neuromorphic-computing-bees

Which illustrates exactly why you should avoid AI summaries and look at the search results yourself!

 

[jacs]

My time as a full time student mostly predates the Internet (Unless you count email & USENet) (Boy I feel really old today!) so the whole idea of a company devoted to "Learning assistance" (aka Cheating!) on the scale of Chegg feels so foreign, but I'm sure there were equivalents back in the "pre-internet days".

So I'm not really a "fan" of the idea of using a "service" like that (CaaS - Cheating as a Service ?) to avoid learning.

But Google driving them to bankruptcy, intentional or not, in this way seems very uncompetitive. It seems like Google isn't beating them at their own game but is keeping them from even competing. Or so it seems.

 

[HiroTheProtagonist]

In other news, Amtrak sues Delta Airlines because Delta Airlines makes the travel experience better, and people prefer flying for 3 hours versus 19 hours on a train.

Pretty bad example, given that the airlines have spent decades helping lobby against passenger rail initiatives that would make travel by train viable for places other than the eastern seaboard.

 

[MHStrawn]

They're suing because Google is repackaging Chegg content as an AI Summary, denying Chegg a click-through to their site and the original content Google regurgitated.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.277735/gov.uscourts.dcd.277735.1.0.pdf


It's easy to make a "better product" when you're poaching the content.

I too can manufacture cars at a lower price by stealing my manufacturer's parts. It's a genius business strategy.

 

[MHStrawn]

Personally, I can’t imagine a more pleasant result than ‘Edtech’ battling ‘AI’ in an all-out war to the death, after which both lie in smouldering ruins.

Yeah, this is a battle where we hope both contestants are mortally wounded.

 

[arsfez]

This below is a good description:

For the unfamiliar, Chegg's main product (and I am a former customer, no clean hands here) is a subscription to a repository of every problem in every textbook, so that students can copy homework answers without learning anything. They get these answers by paying "experts" in lower-cost countries miniscule amounts for each problem they solve (like all gigslave jobs, the actual pay rate is not disclosed, but we all know it's criminally low.)

However, this is plain wrong:

It's hard to overstate [...] the amount that it's [...] ignored by many faculty and institutions.

As already said:

From experience, it can take days - and many person hours - for someone at a university or college to work through Chegg's processes and have a single piece of assessment removed. And that's time we can't spend supporting our students.

The only way to not "ignore" Chegg would be to pay for a subscription so that one can monitor their content and perhaps ask for removal, something that they may decide not to do anyway. Also, as an instructor, I am absolutely not willing to spend any money to support a business:

• whose mission is to undermine student learning by facilitating cheating,
• and that promotes copyright infringement (my copyrighted teaching materials have been posted without permission).

Perhaps a school could purchase an institutional license, but most institutions have limited budgets and they should not be spending it on promoting something that goes against their foundational principles.

I am not a fan of Google's scraping practices, but Chegg can go out of business today as far as I am concerned.

 

[TranslateDoggie]

Chegg is a website that is based around cheating. I have no sympathy that their business model has basically disappeared because generative AI is better than the minions of poorly paid 3rd world (or 'global south') people who provided 'answers' for assignment and exam solutions. On the positive: generative AI is a better teacher than 3rd world universities. It is quite possible to get genuine learning experiences from free tier generative AI, even up to at least mid-level (if not higher) university standard. On the negative: cheating on assignments, even at higher level university courses, is often undetectable now. Possessing a university degree might mean that you have some minimum level of understanding, or alternatively, it might mean that you are reasonably good at writing prompts and editing the results.

I get the sense that the whole experience of education (both K-12 and higher) has undergone a complete overhaul since I went through it just a quarter-century ago. I wonder if it might be more effective to downplay written work and grade students more on in-person demonstration of reasoning, to check whether they actually understand the class material instead of just regurgitating something an algorithm produced.

(But of course, that would raise its own set of issues, from the difficulty of grading performance objectively to the fact that it would penalize students who do know their subject matter but curl up into a tiny ball at the thought of having to defend themselves in front of a group. So I dunno. Good luck, everyone.)

 

[loaftl]

I'm with google here, chegg is a disgustingly parasitic company and I hope that they collapse.

 

[thinkreal]

This worries me both in general, but also particularly because Chegg is the parent company of Busuu, the app I use to learn Japanese. And I have to decide soon whether to pay for another year of the service. Will they go out of business?

It’s a good thing that I transcribe every lesson to paper.

PIRATE!!!
Who said you are permitted an offline copy? You are depriving Chegg, Google and probably Facebook of return-visit stats! Not to mention your improved learning retention that may reduce their future revenue streams and lateral monetisation opportunities.

YOU are the real reason their stock is tanking

 

[Liselotte]

How is this different from, say, Arstechnica summarizing a report/article from APnews?

It’s very different. A news site, like Arstechnica, pays ap news agency for their news.

https://www.ap.org/

edit: to further clarify. Sites like ars do not simply go to apnews.com (the consumer facing site) and copy and paste what they like. They purchase a service, like described in the link above.

Then what are the different authors listed on the page about then?

Ars Technica got this particular article from The Financial Times. Ars also uses (i.e. pays for) wire services like the Associated Press, like theSeb described. Ars does this for news that is of general interest to Ars readers but might have a more heavily financial or legal aspect.

Most of Ars content does NOT come from wire services. Ars reporters write original stories and sometimes do investigative reporting. That's when you'll see a list of one or more names on the page, like poochyena asked about. Both types of content are useful, and Ars definitely pays FT or the AP for whatever it republishes.

 

[Gerash]

A) Google is scraping the chegg content

B) Google is using its monopoly in search content to stop people from actually visiting the other site.

What Chegg content?

Can you show us an example of Chegg content that is publicly accessible?

 

[juzer]

They are exploring "a range of alternatives to maximize shareholder value" while still making 145 milion in revenue just last quarter, made on a shady business practice.

I bet they will be doing some cuts in the workforce as they are obviously stranded for money so they cannot payout millions of bonuses anymore but have to stick to thousands.

 

[nbarnard]

It’s very different. A news site, like Arstechnica, pays ap news agency for their news.

https://www.ap.org/

edit: to further clarify. Sites like ars do not simply go to apnews.com (the consumer facing site) and copy and paste what they like. They purchase a service, like described in the link above.

Sometimes an ARS author reads an existing news reports, writes an article from that, and publishes it, without any financial compensation. Rewriting is a known thing in the industry.

(See the article a few years ago about Seattle’s KUOW bricking Mazda radios. I brought that story to an ARS author, and they rewrote it and posted it.)

 

[fjleon]

so block google from crawling chegg's paywalled pdf's.
don't want to do that? then don't complain

 

[sarusa]

In other news, Amtrak sues Delta Airlines because Delta Airlines makes the travel experience better, and people prefer flying for 3 hours versus 19 hours on a train.

I've taken Amtrak a couple times across country (and up and down coast) and I have to say that in every case it was a far, far better experience than flying Delta. You show up at the terminal, get checked in and your bags checked in 5 minutes, no TSA, have a seat, the train shows up, you get on and go to your seat. There's plenty of leg room and seat room, there's power and the seats recline, the windows are much larger, you can wander around and grab a decent variety of food or drink (including beer/booze). It's MUCH less crowded, the view is much better. Then you get to your destination, hop off, your bags are there, that's it! We just did it recently from Seattle to Vancouver. Also, Delta is... well, I guess they're better than Spirit.

The only downside is, as you say, it takes a lot longer. But if I had the time I would do it a lot more often. If it's an overnight run I get a bed, I think for another $100? Which is okay because the ticket is cheaper... well, usually. Train tickets can't compete with the plane tickets when plane tickets get crazy ($99 one way!) But in general the train is cheaper.

And really, in this Chegg vs Google case it's one bunch of criminals suing another bunch of criminals for stealing the stuff they stole and used for nefarious purposes and now Google figured a way to cut them out of their ill gotten gains, oh no what a tragedy.

 

[sarusa]

I don't think I've ever clicked an online ad, let alone bought a product that way. It's funny to think that companies are fighting over my clicks and views when these "impressions" do not actually make them any money.

You probably don't respond to phishing email or post videos on TikTok every time you take a poop either. I also don't click on online ads or even see them with ublock, pihole, etc. If everyone were like us online ads would collapse and Google could bleed out in a ditch (if only), but we are a small, small minority. Except for my tech savvy friends, every time I look at someone's phone or browser, they've got ads. So many ads. I am just horrified that they are 'reading' articles when 2/3 of the screen is taken up with moving ads.

And they don't have their mental shields up against it at all. Normal people are moderately cautious about things, but have not completely hardened their hearts to ads. MAGAs and Woo people are some of the the most credulous, ignorant, people on Earth. They believe anything they see on their 'fair and balanced' sites, which is why ads there peddling bull[poop] news and scams are worth so much. I can't even count the number of times I've gotten pings from my Mom about 'hey have you seen this?' 'It's another scam, Mom.'

Anyhow, Google and Chegg do make a ton of money from getting their crap in front of other people's eyes.

 

[graylshaped]

I think cases like this are best examined not just from the perspective of "Who has the right to this cash flow," but more from the perspective of "Which recipient of this cash flow will result in a greater public good when it reaches them?"

Like many of the AI applications out there, Google's AI overview doesn't reward/reimburse/pay out to the groups who are responsible for the data it provides to end-users. So if Google's AI is providing the end user good information, it's preventing those who are publishing that good information from making a living off their work. If it's not providing good information, it's harming the end user to a varying extent.

The way that Google's employing it's AI overview is unsustainable if it works, resulting in the stagnation of usable information at best, or the degradation of overall internet usability at worst in the long run.

Google isn't the only "AI" company doing this, but Google's ubiquity in search provides a ripe opportunity to crowd out competitors in fields far, well, afield from "AI" itself.

 

[graylshaped]

And really, in this Chegg vs Google case it's one bunch of criminals suing another bunch of criminals for stealing the stuff they stole and used for nefarious purposes and now Google figured a way to cut them out of their ill gotten gains, oh no what a tragedy.

I'm fairly confident when told they were being sued by Chegg, the Google executive response was "Who?" They're fairly ecumenical with respect to who they are okay with driving out of business.