In the latest instance of Google discouraging users from clicking on links, the search giant has launched a new feature that uses AI to summarize trending news stories.
As first reported on by TechCrunch, the AI summaries are appearing for users in the US inside Google’s main mobile search apps on iOS and Android under the main Discover news feed. Tiny logos of publishers appear in the upper left-hand corner, haphazardly reminding users of where the information actually came from.
Underlining the janky nature of the tech, large text under the summary warns that it was “generated with AI, which can make mistakes,” seemingly in an attempt to preempt blowback of the type that Apple received after it rolled out a similar news-summarizing feature that turned out to hallucinate wild misinformation.
A Google spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that the change represented an official US launch, and will focus on trending lifestyle topics, including sports and entertainment.
However, in Futurism‘s own testing, the feature eagerly summarized a story about two merging supermassive black holes, which decidedly doesn’t fall under the “lifestyle” category. We reached out to Google for clarification, but didn’t receive a response by press time.
It’s a worrying development for the news industry, which is already reeling from greatly reduced traffic from the search giant. Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that news sites are being starved by Google’s AI Overviews feature, which effectively eliminates the need to click on links in search results by paraphrasing content within search results.
While some publications have opted to sign lucrative partnerships with AI companies such as OpenAI, the industry is already feeling the hurt as the AI industry ingests its work and feeds it back to users with a disregard for accuracy, copyright, and media revenue.
In that context, the publishing industry’s woes could soon take a turn for the worse now that Google is actively dissuading users from clicking through to human-written journalism inside the Discover feed.
With plummeting referrals, business models such as relying on display ad revenues and user subscriptions are on shaky ground.
Could we be standing at the precipice of what The Verge‘s Nilay Patel called “Google Zero“: a point at which Google gives up sending traffic to publications altogether by answering all questions with AI?
The news industry is already being starved of traffic, forcing publications to scale down significantly. Case in point, Business Insider was forced to lay off 21 percent of its employees earlier this year, with CEO Barbara Peng citing “extreme traffic drops outside of our control.”
Making matters worse is the tech’s tendency to hallucinate factual claims. Google has repeatedly caught flak for its AI Overviews feature, which has consistently misled users and given head-scratching answers that can seem to be plucked from a parallel universe.
In other words, it’s almost certainly only a matter of time until Google’s Discover feature will bungle facts and mislead users about what’s happening around the world — a predicament the tech giant seems to be painfully aware of, even as it doubles down on the tech at all costs.
More on AI and the news: Apple’s AI Is Constantly Butchering Huge News Stories Sent to Millions of Users
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