Google has put artificial intelligence at the front and center of its search bar. The most-visited site on the internet still shows the same list of links to users, but they have to scroll past a summarized response from an AI chatbot, a feature Google calls AI Overviews. The change to what was once the gateway to the rest of the internet has been profound, and the browsing habits of billions of people are shifting.
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That is, randomly mixed up statements from a few different Reddit threads completed with hallucinated info and delivered with total confidence. Perfect, if you don’t need correct information, just some text.
However, if you need information, now you either scroll through the summary and start glancing through the top results, or you start reading the summary, hover over the “sources “, guess which one may the statement actually come from, read it, and check it the source seems valid and the summary is accurate.
I’d argue that the summary is a net negative under both scenarios. It would be great to get quicker answers, if you could trust it, but because you can’t, it’s not.