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Google’s AI Overview is flawed by design, and a new company blog post hints at why
(arstechnica.com)
this post was submitted on 31 May 2024
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
Right now, it's an experimental feature that is not active for everyone, but when a participating user searches for a topic, they might see an AI-generated answer at the top of the results, pulled from highly ranked web content and summarized by an AI model.
While Google claims this approach is "highly effective" and on par with its Featured Snippets in terms of accuracy, the past week has seen numerous examples of the AI system generating bizarre, incorrect, or even potentially harmful responses, as we detailed in a recent feature where Ars reporter Kyle Orland replicated many of the unusual outputs.
Given the circulating AI Overview examples, Google almost apologizes in the post and says, "We hold ourselves to a high standard, as do our users, so we expect and appreciate the feedback, and take it seriously."
Because accuracy is paramount in Search, AI Overviews are built to only show information that is backed up by top web results.
Here we see the fundamental flaw of the system: "AI Overviews are built to only show information that is backed up by top web results."
Google Search has been broken for some time, and now the company is relying on those gamed and spam-filled results to feed its new AI model.
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