Communications of the ACM
Google Unveils Plan to Demolish the Journalism Industry Using AI
Google's new search interface, built on a model trained on unpaid-for human output, will swallow even more human-made content and spit it back out to information-seekers, while taking clicks away from the publishers generating that content.
Credit: Getty/Futurism
Remember back in 2018, when Google removed "don't be evil" from its code of conduct?
It's been living up to that removal lately. At its annual I/O in San Francisco this week, the search giant finally lifted the lid on its vision for AI-integrated search — and that vision, apparently, involves cutting digital publishers off at the knees.
Google's new AI-powered search interface, dubbed "Search Generative Experience," or SGE for short, involves a feature called "AI Snapshot." Basically, it's an enormous top-of-the-page summarization feature. Ask, for example, "why is sourdough bread still so popular?" — one of the examples that Google used in their presentation — and, before you get to the blue links that we're all familiar with, Google will provide you with a large language model (LLM) -generated summary. Or, we guess, snapshot.
"Google's normal search results load almost immediately," The Verge's David Pierce explains. "Above them, a rectangular orange section pulses and glows and shows the phrase 'Generative AI is experimental.' A few seconds later, the glowing is replaced by an AI-generated summary: a few paragraphs detailing how good sourdough tastes, the upsides of its prebiotic abilities, and more."
From Futurism
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