\n<\/p>\n
One of the big worries with the rise of these AI CliffsNotes products is how much they tend to get wrong. You can easily see how AI summarizations, without human intervention, can provide not just incorrect information, but sometimes dangerously incorrect results. For example, in response to a search query asking why cheese isn\u2019t sticking to a pizza, Google\u2019s AI suggested<\/a> that you should add \u201c1\/8 cup of non-toxic glue to the sauce to give it more tackiness.\u201d (X users later discovered the AI was taking this suggestion from an 11-year-old Reddit post by a user called \u201cfucksmith.\u201d) Another result told people who are bitten by a rattlesnake to \u201capply ice<\/a> or heat to the wound,\u201d which would do about as much to save your life as crossing your fingers and hoping for the best. Other search queries have just resulted in completely incorrect information, like one where someone asked which presidents attended University of Wisconsin\u2014Madison, and Google explained that<\/a> President Andrew Jackson attended college there in 2005<\/a>, even though he died 160 years earlier, in 1845.<\/p>\n On Thursday, Google said in a blog post that it was scaling back some of its summarization results in certain areas, and working to try to fix the problems it did see. \u201cWe\u2019ve been vigilant in monitoring feedback and external reports, and taking action on the small number of AI Overviews that violate content policies,\u201d Liz Reid<\/strong>, who is Head of Google Search, wrote on the company\u2019s website<\/a>. \u201cThis means overviews that contain information that\u2019s potentially harmful, obscene, or otherwise violative.\u201d<\/p>\n Google has also tried to allay the concerns of publishers. In another post last month, Reid wrote<\/a> that the company has seen \u201cthe links included in AI Overviews get more clicks than if the page had appeared as a traditional web listing for that query\u201d and that as Google expands this \u201cexperience, we\u2019ll continue to focus on sending valuable traffic to publishers and creators.\u201d<\/p>\n While AI can regurgitate facts, it lacks the human understanding and context necessary for truly insightful analysis. The oversimplification and potential misrepresentation of complex issues in AI summaries could further dumb down public discourse and lead to a dangerous spread of misinformation. This isn\u2019t to say that humans are not capable of that. If there\u2019s anything the last decade of social media has taught us it\u2019s that humans are more than capable of spreading misinformation and prioritizing their own biases over facts. However, as AI-generated summaries become increasingly prevalent, even those who still value well-researched, nuanced journalism may find it increasingly difficult to access such content. If the economics of the news industry continue to deteriorate, it may be too late to prevent AI from becoming the primary gatekeeper of information, with all the risks that entails.<\/p>\n The news industry\u2019s response to this threat has been mixed. Some outlets have sued OpenAI for copyright infringement\u2014as The New York Times<\/em> did<\/a> in December\u2014while others have decided to do business with them. This week The Atlantic<\/em> and Vox became the latest news organizations to sign<\/a> licensing deals with OpenAI, allowing the company to use their content to train AI models, which could be seen as training robots to take jobs even more quickly. Media giants like News Corp, Axel Springer, and the Associated Press are already<\/a> on board. Still, proving it\u2019s not beholden to any machine overlords, The Atlantic<\/em> published a story on the media\u2019s \u201cdevil\u2019s bargain\u201d<\/a> with OpenAI on the same day its CEO, Nicholas Thompson,<\/strong> announced their partnership.<\/p>\n Another investor I spoke with likened the situation to a scene in Tom Stoppard<\/strong>\u2019s Arcadia,<\/em> in which one character remarks that if someone stirs jam into their porridge by swirling it in one direction, they can\u2019t reconstitute the jam by then stirring the opposite way. \u201cThe same is going to be true for all of these summarizing products,\u201d the investor continues. \u201cEven if you tell them you don\u2019t want them to make your articles shorter, it\u2019s not like you can un-stir your content out of them.\u201d<\/p>\n But here\u2019s the question I have. Let\u2019s just say Google and OpenAI and Facebook succeed, and we read summaries of news, rather than the real thing. Eventually, those news outlets will go out of business, and then who is going to be left to create the content that they need to summarize? Or maybe it won\u2019t matter by then because we\u2019ll be so lazy and obsessed with shorter content that the AI will choose to summarize everything into a single word, like Irtnog.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n