Google Hit With Lawsuit Over Its Loathsome AI Overviews

Google is being sued by Chegg — yes, the barely-hanging-on company that has furnished many a college student with homework answers and cheap textbooks— over its infamously shoddy AI Overviews, Reuters reports.

In a lawsuit filed Monday, Chegg accused the tech giant of abusing its monopoly of the search engine market to pressure websites like itself into letting its content be scraped by Google's AI tools for free. The advent of AI Overviews, the company says, has turned Google from a "search engine" into an "answer engine."

And the upshot, per the lawsuit, is that by summarizing its material in the AI-powered search summaries, Google is diverting traffic away from Chegg's website and hurting its bottom line. The foundering California-based tech company laid off hundreds of employees last year, suffering a 24 percent decline in year-over-year net revenue, according to a recent company statement, with its stock barely trading above one dollar. 

"Our lawsuit is about more than Chegg — it's about the digital publishing industry, the future of internet search, and about students losing access to quality, step-by-step learning in favor of low-quality, unverified AI summaries," Chegg CEO Nathan Schultz said in the statement.

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