Gen AI in the UK
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“Gen AI in the UK.
It’s coming sometime, maybe.
Give the wrong date, hallucinate.
Your future dream is a shopping scheme”
as The Sex Pistols might have sung, if they weren’t nearly 50 years ago.
Of course, General AI is a pipe dream, told to Investors to fluff them into pumping ever more billions into the Artificial Intelligence industry. (Don’t ask me – I’ve been well and truly left behind because I didn’t embrace the metaverse. Or NFTs.)
Two days ago, Google announced Google Search: Introducing AI Mode in the UK, ahead of the EU and its pesky laws and regulations (it’s currently available in UK, USA and India).
As far as I can tell, the only reason for “AI” in search is to keep people on a Google domain, rather than send them to where the search engine actually found the information that its AI regurgitates. If you think it’s not fair for Google to hoover up other people’s content without sending visitors their way, and thereby starving them of search revenue, you wouldn’t be the only one.
A recent report said AI summaries cause ‘devastating’ drop in audiences:
“a site previously ranked first in a search result could lose about 79% of its traffic for that query if results were delivered below an AI overview. The study also found that links to YouTube – owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet – were more prominent compared with the normal search result system. The research has been submitted as part of a legal complaint to the UK’s competition watchdog about the impact of Google AI Overviews
In the communist European Union, independent publishers have filed an anti-trust complaint about Google’s AI Overviews:
Google’s core search engine service is misusing web content for Google’s AI Overviews in Google Search, which have caused, and continue to cause, significant harm to publishers, including news publishers in the form of traffic, readership and revenue loss” the Independent Publishers Alliance document said.
When asked about this at the Google’s second DMA compliance workshop earlier this month, Oliver Bethell (Google’s Head of Competition, Regulatory Engagement & Advisory replied
Referral traffic itself and how those traffic flows have evolved over time. I will say this, and I’m happy to follow up, but the picture is somewhat more nuanced from our perspective. We see that AI overviews lead to a greater diversity of sites appearing in search. We see that the quality of the traffic that is being sent to websites is of a higher quality. People tend to stay longer and we’re seeing more links in the web results so more opportunities for websites
So everything’s great and people who publish should stop their whining.
Perhaps you don’t care about plagiarism, or starvation of independent publishers and sites. If so, that’s your right (but you’re a monster). Google became huge back in the carboniferous era, because it was by far the best way to search the web. So how good is its shiny new AI search?
Amazingly brilliant! or so Google claims:
Picture this: asking Google Search whatever is on your mind — as messy or complicated as it may be — and instantly receiving an AI-powered response that really understands your question, gives you the information you’re looking for and helps you dig deeper into the topic.
But let’s not take Google’s word for it.
A small company called housefresh.com that tests domestic air purifiers did some deep research into how Google’s AI overviews try to sell you products that Google search knows are bad, or which don’t exist. In her excellent, deep blogpost Beware of the Google AI salesman and its cronies, Gisele Navarro writes
are AI Overviews leading you to the best results on the web? Or is this just a new prime spot for selling you products you will regret buying? And how does this change affect the websites that made Google’s AI possible in the first place?
To find out, we spent weeks conducting research into air purifiers we reviewed (including models that don’t exist) to determine whether Google Search results and AI Overviews are leading consumers to good advice.
It turns out this rabbit hole is deeper than we thought, with ramifications that span major Reddit communities and could be leading you to scams and defamatory hallucinations.
It’s a long, deep read. But I thoroughly recommend it.
Bonus: Bruce’s handy No-Ai search trick
Right now (in the UK, at least) the best way to avoid AI nonsense in your search is to include a swear word in your search terms. For example, searching “what’s the best beatles album” showed me an “AI overview”:
Searching for “what’s the best fucking beatles album” gives no such rubbish.
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