It’s not the same but it’s similar enough when, as the article states, it is solely about short summaries. The article may be wrong, Google may be outright lying, maybe, maybe, maybe.
Google, as by far the web’s largest ad provider, has a business incentive to direct users towards the web sites, so the website operators have to pay Google money. Maybe I’m missing something but I just don’t see the business sense in Google not doing that and so far I don’t see anything approximating convincing arguments.
Yes. How do you think the Gemini model understands language in the first place?
Licensed and public domain content, of which there is plenty, maybe even content specifically created by Google to train the data. “the Gemini model understands language” in itself hardly is proof of any wrongdoing. I don’t claim to have perfect knowledge or memory, so it’s certainly possible that I missed more specific evidence but “the Gemini model understands language” by itself definitively is not.