Did you know about this? BG3 players exploit children? Are you aware of this? Qi2 slows down older pixels? If we wrote these misleading headlines, readers would rip us a recent one, but Google is experimentally starting to replace the original headlines of the articles it serves with such artificial intelligence nonsense.
I read a lot of bedtime messages via Google Discover – aka “swipe right on the home screen of your Samsung Galaxy or Google Pixel until the news feed appears” – and that’s where recent AI headlines start to appear.
Not all of them are bad. For example, “The origami model wins the prize“And”Hyundai and Kia are gaining share” seem okay, even if not as intriguing as the original headlines. (“Hyundai and Kia are closing in on the competition, with U.S. market share reaching a new record“And”14-year-old wins award for origami that can support 10,000 times its own weight” sound like they might actually be worth clicking on!)
But in an apparent attempt to reduce every story to four words or less, a new major Google experiment is included plenty misleading and nonsensical headlines from journalists’ work, and with little disclosure of the fact that Google’s AI transcribes them.
The first thing I saw was “Steam Machine price revealed“, which certainly wasn’t the case! Valve won’t reveal it until next year. Ars Technicaoriginal headline sounded much more reasonable: “Valve’s Steam Machine looks like a console, but don’t expect it to be priced like one.”
“Microsoft developers using artificial intelligence“? No shit, Sherlock. (This was tacked on to my friend Tom Warren’s story about “How Microsoft Developers Use Artificial Intelligence” – Google Removed Six Letters That Turn a Stupid Headline Into a Real One!)
I’ve also seen Google try to claim that “AMD’s graphics processor has overtaken Nvidia” as if AMD announced a recent breakthrough graphics card when actual Wccftech history tells the story of how one German retailer managed to sell more AMD units than Nvidia in one week. Wccftechthe headline was relatively responsible, but Google turned it into clickbait.
There are also headlines that simply don’t make sense out of context, and which real editors avoid like the plague. What does he do? “Schedule 1 Farming Backup” have in mind? How about? “AI tag debate heats up”?
Make no mistake, the problem isn’t just that AI headlines are bad – Google is taking away our agency to promote our own work, as if we wrote a book and the bookstore decided to change its cover.
We try to create headlines that invite readers, summarize the news responsibly, and assist them understand Why the story matters immediately and excites when it is justified. (Does my headline for this story sound thrilling enough?) And yet Google seems to think it can simply replace these headlines in a way that might confuse our readers into thinking was generating clickbait because the names of our publications appear next to them.
Google reveals it something about these messages is “Generated using artificial intelligence that may make errors” but not what, and readers will only see this message if they click the “See more” button:
It’s too easy for readers to think that we’re intentionally promoting our stories on Google Discover with these headlines.
The good news is that this is a Google experiment. If the response is sufficient, the company will likely not proceed. “These screenshots represent a small UI experiment for a subset of Discover users,” says Google spokeswoman Mallory Deleon Edge. “We are testing a new design that rearranges existing headings to make it easier to digest the details of topics before using links from the Internet.”
However, the general trend at Google is to prioritize its own products over sending clicks to news sites. While the company vows not to destroy the web with AI-powered search, you’d be hard-pressed to find a news outlet that would agree, and even Google admitted in court that “the open web is already in rapid decline.”
This is the reason Edge now has a subscription: We won’t survive Google Zero without your assist.