After cratering web traffic with its AI summaries that are prone to misinformation and hallucinations, journalists around the world waited with bated breath for Google’s next great innovation. No longer content with simply plagiarizing others’ work for AI Summaries, Google is now using AI to rewrite headlines in search results.
This is per The Verge, which is ironically always the first to get screwed by the tech and AI industry’s attempts at replacing trustworthy media with hallucinating chatbots. Obviously, much like Grammarly’s attempt to steal writers’ identity, Google didn’t even attempt to ask for consent in this. Instead, it’s editorializing headlines in the company’s once coveted “10 blue links” with AI-generated clickbait that misinforms the user. Writer Sean Hollister writes, “Google reduced our headline ‘I used the ‘cheat on everything’ AI tool and it didn’t help me cheat on anything’ to just five words: “‘Cheat on everything’ AI tool.’ It almost sounds like we’re endorsing a product we do not recommend at all.”
Google tells The Verge that these changes are just an experiment, much like the one the company performed in Google Discovery. In that case, Google began “experimenting” with AI clickbait on headlines in Discovery, which later evolved into a permanent feature. So we should assume that AI headlines will become the norm sooner rather than later. According to Google spokespeople Jennifer Kutz, this is to help match queries to headlines. To do so, it’s awkwardly snipping bits of the headline or changing it whole cloth in ways that are misleading and inaccurate. Why stop there? Why not just change the headline to the exact query, whether the article is a good match or not? This is all unsurprising. Since Google began diminishing its Search feature to chase those AI ad bucks, its crown-jewel product has become increasingly unusable for users and hostile toward journalists.
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