Google’s AI search setback

"users encountering the company’s AI-generated summaries atop search results found over and over again that Google was hallucinating or worse... suggested putting nontoxic glue in your pizza... putting gasoline in your spaghetti... reported that just 17 American presidents were white ... that people eat one to three rocks per day", courtesy The Onion. Most viral screenshots were actually fake, but that simply illustrates the problem: "almost any search result ... seems plausible enough... Without any knowledge base of its own [Google]’s large language model simply summarizes and regurgitates what it finds on the web according to unknown criteria", so it blamed its users.

Apart from accuracy problems, this is "automated plagiarism... slightly reworded versions of journalists’ copy, designed to give people ever fewer reasons to step outside Google’s walled garden... [as] it is preparing to show ads in AI overviews".

It will also wither the web that once "thrived because of its openness and decentralization". Google was already "on an inexorable path toward exclusively ranking and sending traffic to big, powerful brands that dominate the web [over] small, independent sites and businesses"; the introduction of AI overviews means "identifying the relatively few credible publishers left on the web, then compressing their collective output into a slurry ... served up ... where search results once appeared"