What is going on
Over the past few decades, Google’s search engine has been perhaps the single most important factor in dictating what the modern Internet looks like, to the point where the company’s name has become the literal dictionary definition of finding something on the Internet.
The Big Tech giant recently started making a dramatic change to the way its searches work. A step that could have a huge impact, not only for Google itself, but for the entire online ecosystem.
Starting earlier this month, answers generated by artificial intelligence appeared above the usual list of blue links in certain searches. These answers, called AI summaries, use Google’s Gemini AI model to gather information from the web to provide a concise answer without scrolling or extra clicks.
Like other AI models, Gemini has access to a vast amount of online information that it uses to generate responses to, in the company’s words, “Let Google do the searching for you.” So if you enter something like “exercise for knee pain,” Gemini will pull from the vast amount of data it has on the subject and list stretches and strength-training movements, while saving you the trouble of clicking through to individual websites.
There’s nothing unique about Google bringing AI to search. Just about every major tech company, including Yahoo, has integrated AI into more and more online experiences in recent months. But changes to Google’s search function are only more important, because it’s critical to the way we use the internet. More than 90% of global search traffic (8.5 billion searches per day) takes place on Google. Much of the Internet economy is also built around drawing eyeballs and clicking through Google Search.
Why there is discussion
Since its launch in the US, most of the conversation about AI Overviews has been about the poor results it has produced. Google has suggested adding glue to pizza sauce, eating rocks for healthy digestion and claiming that astronauts have encountered cats on the moon, among other things. This phenomenon, known as hallucination, is something all AI models struggle with. But many technology experts are concerned about the implications of the world’s most important knowledge engine suddenly being filled with unreliable – or even potentially dangerous – falsehoods.
AI optimists say that Overviews, while imperfect, still represent a future where people can access the information they need more effectively and efficiently than ever before. They claim that the bad information issues are only a short-term issue and will become increasingly accurate over time as Google identifies and fixes the flaws, which the company is reportedly currently aggressively working on.
However, some of the biggest concerns about Outlines have nothing to do with its accuracy. Some experts worry that with AI summaries at the top of their searches, users will stop clicking on the links that also appear, which would mean less attention (and ultimately less revenue) for any site that relies on search traffic to support its activities. . They fear that Overviews could ultimately put online publishers — from news services to entertainment blogs to recipe blogs — out of business, leaving no one behind to create the information the AI needs to produce its answers.
What’s next
Overviews is currently available in the US, but Google expects to open it up to at least 1 billion of its global users by the end of the year.
The company also previewed new AI features it says it plans to add to search in the near future, including event scheduling, the ability to answer very specific questions, and the ability to search using a video instead of with words.
Perspectives
The economy of the Internet is in danger
“If the AI response engine does its job well enough, users won’t have to click on links at all. Whatever they’re looking for will be there at the top of their search results. And the grand bargain underpinning Google’s relationship with the open web – you give us articles, we’ll give you traffic – could be falling apart.” –Kevin Roose, New York Times
The average person is probably going to love AI overviews
“I suspect that billions of people would like to get their answers to complicated questions directly on the search results page, with no interest in where the information comes from, as long as it is accurate enough.” — Casey Newton, platformer
Google no longer cares about informing its users
“Providing a robust, almost necessary web search service is no longer the priority, not that it has been for years. Instead, Google wants to shower you with new gadgets whose basic functionalities lack everything that made Google an empire, a verb, a trusted keeper of the information highway.” — Nitish Pahwa, Slate
AI helps Google restore search to its original purpose
“Generative AI…in a sense, represents a return to what Google Search was before the company infused it with product marketing and snippets, sidebars and Wikipedia snippets – all of which have arguably contributed to the product’s degradation. The AI-driven searches that Google executives described seemed to go less to an oracle than to a more pleasant version of Google: grouping the relevant tabs together, directing you to the most useful links, and perhaps even encouraging you to click them.” – Matteo Wong, The Atlantic
AI can eventually destroy all the content it needs to survive
“By making it even less inviting for people to contribute to the Web’s collective knowledge pool, Google’s summary answers could also leave its own and others’ AI tools with less accurate, less timely, and less interesting information. .” – Scott Rosenberg, Axios
Google is rolling out AI to many people who are not ready for it yet
“This feature will likely expose billions of people who have never used a chatbot before to AI-generated text. Although AI summaries are designed to save you time, they can lead to less reliable results.” – Reece Rogers, wired
People don’t know whether they can trust information when it is taken out of its original context
‘You are not concerned with the original source or where it comes from. You don’t see any comments, you don’t even see who the author is. And I think those things are really crucial for digital media literacy.” — Stuart Geiger, professor of data science at UC San Diego, to Marketplace
No matter how much Big Tech pushes AI, human-created content will ultimately win
“Users will quickly learn to recognize AI-generated content and will find it increasingly less interesting and engaging compared to human-generated content. Like a great novelist, journalists have a voice and style that people find interesting, and this will become even more apparent as AI content becomes a less interesting foundation.” — Rob Meadows, chief technology officer at OpenWeb, for CNET