by Google is making some changes to its AI Overview, after the artificial intelligence-powered search feature returned “strange and erratic” responses to people’s online searches.
AI Overview was introduced last month at Google’s annual I/O developer conference. Now, when people use Google Search to find information on certain topics, a box of AI-generated text appears at the top of the search results, annotated with links to external websites. Traditional search results appear below the AI Overview, representing a major shift in how Google presents information.
According to a blog post from Google VP Liz Reid, AI Overviews results are generated using the company’s large language model (LLM), Gemini, and are designed for situations when someone wants to “get a quick overview of a topic and links to learn more.”
Google technology expert Alex Joseph told ABC Audio that AI Overviews is capable of solving more complex queries than traditional Google Search.
“With AI Overview what [Google] what is really possible is to synthesize a lot of information and get the answer you need very quickly,” said Joseph.
Instead of presenting users with pages of links to comb through, however, Joseph said, AI Overviews streamlines the process by summarizing information and providing users with a concise answer.
“They’ll have less friction, they won’t have to click through to several different websites, which can often be a bug if you need some information very quickly,” noted Chris Stokel-Walker, technology journalist and author of the book “How AI Ate the World: A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence – and Its Long Future.”
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However, Stokel-Walker said the new feature makes it more difficult for people using Google Search to verify the accuracy of the information they are reading.
“We have become accustomed to the last twenty years of Google Search dominance with the results we get to the right search term for the most part,” he told ABC Audio. “Suddenly, if you get rid of that, as Google is suggesting, and you put an answer directly into the search results page that it created through AI generation, you have no real way to identify and analyze that information to see if it’s true or it’s not.”
There are other concerns about the new feature as well. For one, generative AI technology, from Google and elsewhere, has faced criticism for “snobbery” — that is, generating information that is unreliable and inaccurate.
For example, in the last few weeks since AI Overviews was made available to the public, people using Google Search have been advised to eat at least one small rock a day, and one user said that getting cheese is a good way to stick to pizza. that is mixing glue into the tomato sauce – both of which are obviously bad ideas. He also said that Andrew Jackson, the seventh US president who died in 1845, graduated from the college in 2005.
Stokel-Walker said any benefit from AI Overviews ultimately comes from a trade-off between convenience and cost. “You no longer have to click through five or six different pages and maybe several pages of search results to get the right answer, but it also means that the answer might be wrong or it might not be the one you want really get,” he said.
“We’ve always been very clear about the limitations of LLMs, that there will be hallucinations from time to time,” said Google’s Alex Joseph, adding that’s why AI Overviews also lists the websites it uses to generate some answers.
“Part of the reason is that we present all the information to you holistically,” Joseph said. “These are quick shortcuts to help you get some information quickly, but they’re also followed by areas where you can go, double check, verify.”
Joseph added that not all questions are best served by AI.
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As a result of the unusual responses reported by some social media users, Google announced that it had made “more than a dozen technical improvements” to AI Overviews. According to Liz Reid’s blog post, they include limiting the inclusion of user-generated content, as well as satirical or humorous web pages, in the data used to craft the AI Overview. Reid added that Google has launched “further exciting improvements to improve our quality protections” for health content, and aims to[s] without showing AI Overview on hard news topics, where freshness and factuality are important.”
The blog post also notes that “AI Overviews typically don’t ‘sallucinate’ or make things up in the ways that other LLM products might,” and that the wrong answers are the result of “misunderstanding questions, misunderstanding the nuance of language the. web, or without a lot of great information available.”
In addition to the accuracy concerns, Stokel-Walker said that Google’s AI prioritization Overview of traditional search results could affect revenue and reshape how business is done on the web.
“Websites produce content; they try to make it attractive to Google. Google will show them in its search results. And as a result, people click on their website, they see ads behind that, and the publisher makes the money that allows them to put new content on websites,” explained Stokel-Walker.
By replacing the top of the Google Search results page with AI-generated content, however, Stokel-Walker said fewer visitors could see websites — and therefore less advertising revenue.
It’s an ironic situation, according to Stokel-Walker. That’s because Gemini, the Google LLM to create its AI Overview, relies on the websites it now appears on top of.
“These websites still need to exist, and they need to have a way to make money, because otherwise, there’s nothing to base those AI-generated search results on,” a Stokel-Walker said.
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In a statement to ABC News, Google said that its testing showed that in fact the opposite is happening: that the links included in AI Overviews get more clicks when the page was viewed than it usually does in results search. Google also said it would “continue to focus” on sending valuable traffic to publishers and creators.
Regardless of how concerns about AI Overviews ultimately turn out, it’s just one of the company’s planned features for its technology product line.
“I think it’s a concern to do something like this as quickly as Google is doing it,” said technology journalist C. Scott Brown of the website Android Authority.
Google announced plans for additional features like AI Overviews, which will aim to answer questions about specific web pages or YouTube videos. Brown says those features will hit the market in the face of increased competition.
“And the reason for that is because it feels like it has to. It has to keep up with companies – especially like OpenAI, for example – that are creating AI generation technologies that threaten Google’s core business, that are delivering information to people through Google search, and thus deliver them ads that allow Google to make billions and billions of dollars,” Brown said.
“With Google seeing these things as a threat, it can’t just rest. It can’t figure out how to do this cleanly, and do it right,” said Brown. “It’s just doing it.”
Google makes adjustments to AI Overviews after rocky rollout appeared first on abcnews.go.com
