Google’s notoriously wonky AI Overviews feature — you know, the one that repeatedly makes up facts and literally tells users to eat rocks — is about to get a whole lot more annoying.
On Thursday, the tech giant announced that its AI-generated search summaries will now begin to show ads above, below, and within them, as a way of demonstrating that the technology is capable of actually making money.
It will also serve to assuage concerns that AI chatbots could eat into search ad revenues, which are Google’s biggest cash cow.
Now, if you search how to get a grass stain out of jeans, as seen in an example in Google’s blog post, you’ll get an AI summary which contains a carousel of relevant website links, plus a heavy helping of “Sponsored” ads for stain removers. Revolutionary stuff.
AI as far as big tech is concerned is simply a way to “fix” search engines so that they don’t do the awful crime of fundamentally segregating ads from search results.
it is literally the whole damn point of shoving AI down everybodies throat…
To be fair, it didn’t start out that way. A lot of tech companies just didn’t want to be seen as being behind while OpenAI was making shockwaves around the globe. Iirc, after ChatGPT hit the mainstream a couple years ago, Google’s CEO was said to have sent a company-wide email demanding their own AI research become their number 1 priority.
Now that they finally have their own competitive model, they have to justify why they spent hundreds of millions of dollars over numerous years on this tech. Unfortunately for the rest of us, this just means enshittification will reach new levels… sigh…
“This other company is lying about how good their product is and everyone is buying their bullshit. We can’t miss the bandwagon!”
It would be hilarious if Pichai actually sent an email like this (or even more aggressive and truthful).
Ads have become so deeply embedded into search results that even Google now can no longer tell the difference between them!?!?
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I wonder… how many months would it take even Google to sort it all out now, if it wanted to? At some point, even if they haven’t crossed it yet, certain knowledge simply becomes lost forever.