Right now, but if information becomes a serious obstacle for Google/AI platforms in general, it would easily spend billions to ensure control.

It's not as if Google is a stranger to hiring experts to keep them away from other places!

I would assume that licensing content from paywalled books, research reports, etc. would be much more economical.

I'd guess that google is currently the single largest funder of "content" in the world, between adsense on websites and payouts to YouTubers.

They're certainly not getting the content for free. They're running ads against it, and making money on it, but they are also paying for it. It's a relatively small shift in their funding model to pay out to creators for their contributions to an AI model instead of paying out per pageview.

> I'd guess that google is currently the single largest funder of "content" in the world, between adsense on websites and payouts to YouTubers.

Those are advertisers funding the content, not google. google is just a middleman. They generate no content and pay none of they money, they just facilitate the transaction and take a cut.

Google used to produce/fund content. See YouTube Originals.

I've never seen a YouTube original I liked. It's all garbage.