Google is making some changes to its AI Summaries after the AI-driven search feature returned what the company calls “weird and wrong” answers to people’s online searches.
The AI briefings were presented last month at Google’s annual I/O developer conference. Now, when people use Google Search to find information on certain topics, an AI-generated text box appears at the top of the search results, marked with links to external websites. Traditional search results appear below AI Summaries, marking a major shift in the way Google presents information.
According to a blog post by Google VP Liz Reid, AI Summary results are generated using the company’s large language model (LLM), Gemini, and are designed for when someone wants to “get a quick overview of a topic and link to learn more.”
Liz Reid, vice president, search, Google speaks during an event in New Delhi on December 19, 2022.
Sajjad Hussain/AFP via Getty Images, FILE
Google technology expert Alex Joseph told ABC Audio that AI Overviews is capable of asking more complex questions than a traditional Google Search.
“With a Summary of AI What [Google] can really do is synthesize a lot of information and get you the answer you’re looking for very quickly,” Joseph said.
However, instead of presenting users with pages of links to comb through, 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 a number of different websites, which can often be very bad if you just want some information very quickly,” notes Chris Stokel-Walker, technology . journalist and author of How AI Ate the World: A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence – and Its Long Future.
However, Stokel-Walker said the new feature makes it harder for people using Google Search to verify the accuracy of the information they’re reading.
“We’ve gotten used to the last two decades of Google Search dominance with the results we get for a search term to be mostly right,” he told ABC Audio. “Suddenly, if you get rid of that, as Google is proposing, and actually just enter an answer directly into the search results page that’s generated through generative AI, you have no real way to identify and analyze that information to see whether it’s true or not.”
There are other concerns about the new feature. First, AI-generating technology, both from Google and elsewhere, has faced criticism for being “hallucinating” — that is, for generating information that is unreliable and inaccurate.
For example, in the few weeks since AI Summaries has been available to the public, people using Google Search have been advised to eat at least one small stone a day, and one user said a good way to keep the cheese from sticking on pizza is to mix glue into tomato sauce – both of which are, of course, very 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 Summaries ultimately comes down to a trade-off between convenience and cost. “You no longer have to kind of click through five or six different pages and maybe a few pages of search results to find the right answer, but it also means that the answer might be wrong or it might not be what you want in true. to get”, he said.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai speaks during the tech titan’s annual I/O developer conference on May 14, 2024, in Mountain View, California.
Glenn Chapman/AFP via Getty Images, FILE
“We’ve always been very clear about the limitations of LLMs, that occasionally there will be hallucinations,” said Google’s Alex Joseph, adding that’s why AI Overviews also cites the websites it uses for generated her answers.
“It’s part of the reason we present all the information to you holistically,” Joseph said. “These are quick shortcuts to help you get some information quickly, but they’re followed along with areas where you can go, double check, verify.”
Joseph also said that not all questions are best served by an AI Summary: “We only show them on questions where we have a high confidence that it will be useful and actually improve the experience.”
In the wake of the unusual responses that some social media users have reported, Google announced that it had made “more than a dozen technical improvements” to AI Summaries. According to Liz Reid’s blog post, they include limiting the inclusion of user-generated content, as well as satirical or humorous websites, in the data used to create AI Digests. Reid said that Google also “launched other exciting improvements to improve our quality protections” related to health content and that “the goal[s] to not show AI Digests on hard news topics where freshness and facts are important.”
The blog post also notes that “AI Summaries generally do not ‘hallucinate’ or create things in ways that other LLM products can,” and that incorrect answers are the result of “misinterpreting questions, misinterpreting a nuance of language on the web, or not having a lot of great information available.”
Aside from accuracy concerns, Stokel-Walker said Google prioritizing AI Summaries over traditional search results could impact revenue and reshape the way business is done on the web.
“Websites produce content; they try to make it attractive to Google. Google will show them in search results. And as a result, people click on their website, they then see ads on the back of it and the publisher makes the money that allows them to put new content on the websites,” Stokel-Walker explained.
However, by replacing the top of the Google Search results page with AI-generated content, Stokel-Walker said websites could see fewer visitors — and therefore less ad revenue.
It’s an ironic situation, according to Stokel-Walker. That’s because Gemini, the LLM that Google uses to create its AI Summaries, relies on the web pages it’s now serving in front of.
“These websites still have to exist, and they have to have a way to make money, because otherwise, there’s nothing to base AI-generated search results on,” Stokel-Walker noted.
In a statement to ABC News, Google said that its testing has shown that the opposite is actually happening: that links included in AI Summaries get more clicks than if the site had appeared as usual in search results. Google also said it will “continue to focus” on delivering valuable traffic to publishers and creators.
The Google logo is seen at a trade show in Las Vegas, Nevada, January 10, 2024.
Steve Marcus/Reuters
Regardless of how concerns about AI Summaries ultimately shake out, it’s just one of a slew of features the company has planned for its tech product line.
“I think it’s disturbing to do something like this as quickly as Google is doing it,” said technology journalist C. Scott Brown of the website Android Authority.
Google has announced plans for additional features similar to AI Summaries, which will aim to answer questions about specific websites or YouTube videos. Brown says these features will come to market amid increased competition.
“And the reason it’s doing it is because it feels like it has to. It has to keep up with companies — especially like OpenAI, for example — that are creating AI-generating technologies that are threatening Google’s core business, which is providing information to people. through Google search, and in doing so sends 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 rest. It can’t figure out how to do it cleanly and do it right,” Brown added. “Just gotta do it.”
#Google #adjustments #Roundups #rocky #launch
Image Source : abcnews.go.com
Leave a Reply