Yes. People are actually using LLMs to get directly behind paywalls.
Pro tip: If you confront a news website that has an article that is paywalled, you can ask most LLMs to summarize for you that article that's behind the paywall. The reason is that the LLM bots have scraped all the content in that website that is behind the paywall.
This is happening for two reasons.
One, Google requires you to make all of your content available to it, and if you choose to block its bots that are scraping your content for its AI LLM, it will block you from all search results. There is a huge issue there, a question of real fundamental fairness, and I think it needs to be taken up with a company that is responsible for 90% of all search volume in Canada and is telling news outlets like The Hub and others that if we prevent Google's AI bots from accessing content behind our paywall, we will disappear from all search results across a platform that serves the vast majority of the organic traffic to our website, if not all. That's problem number one.
Problem number two is that with the Online News Act, a condition of receiving funds from the Journalism Collective, which was established to disburse the funds, is that you have to make all the content you produce available to Google, to one specific AI company, one specific LLM and arguably to the most powerful one in the marketplace: the originator of AI Overviews within your Chrome browser and the creator of Google AI Mode, which is something that the company is clearly investing in and that it is rolling out across browsers in Canada and around the world.
You simply don't have a choice as a publisher right now, if you are accepting funds under the Online News Act, to block Google from scraping your content, including subscriber-protected content, because, again, you are a recipient of Online News Act funding. That is an issue that either this committee or someone obviously will have to take up, because it removes any bargaining power from a recipient of Online News Act funding to negotiate with Google over fair terms of what that content is worth to Google, to its LLM and to the clients and customers who are using its AI service.