Brace yourselves, Europe. Google’s AI Overviews are coming, and they’re bringing the promise of synthesized knowledge… and the potential for synthesized nonsense. Following a trial run in the US that involved, among other things, suggesting glue as a pizza sauce ingredient and incorrectly labeling a former president’s religious affiliation (awkward!), Google is now unleashing its AI-powered summary engine on Ireland, Austria, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Spain, and Switzerland.
The premise is simple: you search, Google’s AI chews through the internet, and spits out a concise summary at the top of the results page. Allegedly, this saves you time and effort. The reality, as demonstrated in the US, is that it might save you time, but it could also lead you down a rabbit hole of misinformation and bizarre culinary experiments. Who needs deepfake videos when you have AI-generated factual inaccuracies?
Google insists it has learned from its past mistakes. They’ve tweaked the algorithms, restricted query types, and presumably, staged an intervention with the pizza sauce recipe generator. The official line is that these changes will reduce the risk of offensive content and factually incorrect information. We shall see.
According to Google’s VP of Search, Liz Reid, users who engage with AI overviews tend to “use Google’s search product more” and generate “higher quality” clicks, spending more time on the pages they visit. Translation: users are more likely to click on links after being presented with a pre-digested (and potentially inaccurate) summary. Whether this increased engagement translates to increased user satisfaction remains to be seen. Perhaps people just enjoy arguing with robots.
The language barrier is also supposedly being tackled, with the service available in German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Polish. This means even more opportunities for nuanced information to be lost in translation, or for the AI to accidentally recommend the wrong kind of sausage in each respective country.
One has to wonder: in a world already grappling with misinformation and the decline of critical thinking, is summarizing the internet with a potentially flawed AI the best way forward? Or are we simply accelerating the descent into a state where no one reads beyond the first AI-generated paragraph, happily consuming whatever synthesized reality is presented to them?
Only time will tell if Google’s AI Overviews will be a helpful tool for navigating the vast expanse of the internet, or just another source of questionable information that requires a hefty dose of skepticism. Until then, perhaps double-check that pizza sauce recipe before you start cooking. And maybe lay off the glue.
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