OPINION : Google I / O has historically been an event used to showcase the latest updates coming to Android . However , this calendar week , Google choose to focus on AI alternatively , and specifically how it will change how we sail the web .
Google ’s hunting engine is arguably the most important asset that the company owns , pretend as the launch area to make Google the technology giant it is today . agree toStatista , Google dominate a whopping 82 % of the screen background hunting engine market share , as of January 2024 . In second place is Bing , with just 11 % of the part .
And yet despite its ascendency , Google has announced that it will be drastically modernise its democratic hunt locomotive engine , by integrate a new characteristic visit AI Overview .
This new feature of speech leverages modern unreal intelligence engineering to generate unequalled solvent for many search queries . As the solution are generated by Google they will be embedded into the results of the search locomotive engine , meaning you wo n’t need to press any link to really find the entropy you ’re looking for .
I can sure interpret the solicitation of this for the average user , as you ’re able-bodied to get all of the info you need more quickly , while also having it all neatly resume so you do n’t have to scroll through lines of text . Google even offer you the option to simplify the summary even further , or even fail it down into more detail .
That all sound dandy on paper , but I ’ve get down a lot of concerns about where Google is getting all this information from . Google does at least give credit to the websites and clause that it ’s reap the information from , but given the nature of AI , it ’s not always stark at correctly summarising that information .
Google has also been known to take information from unreliable reservoir , and then present incorrect info as its ‘ Featured Snippet ’ in the hunting results . you could check out the television from Vox below , which showcases some of these important mistakes , including a post that paint a picture dinosaurs never existed , and were simply a construct to indoctrinate nestling .
That picture is admittedly seven years sometime now , and Google will reason that it ’s amend its hunt result significantly in that time frame , but there are a few major error of Google ’s new AI Overview already going viral .
While I ca n’t verify this search result , one post on X(formerly Twitter ) claims that Google ’s AI Overview suggested that anyone suffering from kidney stone should drink urine every 24 hour to help them hap .
Having medical advice that is unvetted by a professional or expert is incredibly dangerous , and Google is work the hazard of doing this by roll out its new AI Overview feature . In fact , even beyond medical advice , Google is unable to ensure that all the information it ’s harvest home is coming from an expert .
Googlerecently compose a passel with Reddit , allowing the tech company to use posts from countless forums to train its AI . During Google I / O , a demonstration video recording also showed Quora crop up up as one of the sources of data used for the answer generated by AI Overview .
Forums are a valuable post to get selective information from other multitude across the World Wide Web , but since anyone can brand without any professional knowledge or fact - checking cognitive process , there is no way to guarantee that what you ’re reading is correct . That ’s completely hunky-dory if you ’re aware of this when scrolling through answers in Reddit and Quora , but it becomes a lot more severe when the entropy is presented as being factual from a swear source such as Google .
Of naturally , that ’s not to say you would n’t still find wrong selective information when using Google ’s lookup locomotive and clicking on a contact to visit a internet site . The divergence here , though , is that the reviewer can make up their own decision as to how trusty the selective information is .
For example , you ’re far more likely to recall the selective information is precise when reading it on the BBC as opposed to an unpaid blog . But with Google , many mass may incorrectly assume that Google is just as honest as any large publication for allow factual info , which sadly is n’t the case .
With the public wide web already rife with misinformation , I ’m growing very concerned that Google ’s push into AI wo n’t actually solve this problem , but intensify it rather . An answer generated by AI is always going to be more prone to error than one write and fact - hold in by an experient diary keeper , and Google needs to understand that quickly before it damage the quality and believability of its search locomotive engine .
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