Google is experimentally replacing news headlines with AI clickbait nonsense

Did you know that BG3 players exploit children? Are you aware that Qi2 slows down old pixels? If we wrote these misleading headlines, readers would tear us a new one – but Google is experimentally starting to replace the original headlines of the articles it runs with AI nonsense like this.

I read a lot of my news at bedtime through Google Discover, which is “swipe right on the home screen of your Samsung Galaxy or Google Pixel until a news feed appears”, and that’s where these new AI titles start to appear.

They are not all bad. For example, “Origami model wins prize” And “Hyundai and Kia gain market share» seem good, even if they are not as interesting as the original headlines. (“Hyundai and Kia overtake competition as US market share hits new record” and “14-year-old wins prize for origami that can support 10,000 times its own weight” seem definitely worth the click!)

But in the apparent attempt to boil down every story to four words or fewer, Google’s new headline experiment is endearing. a lot of misleading and nonsensical headlines about the work of journalists, and with little revelation that Google’s AI is rewriting them.

The very first one I saw was “Steam Engine Price Revealed“, which definitely wasn’t the case! Valve won’t reveal it until next year. Ars Technica‘s original headline was much more reasonable: “Valve’s Steam Machine looks like a console, but don’t expect it to be priced like a console.” »

“Microsoft developers using AI“? No shit, Sherlock. (This one was added to my colleague Tom Warren’s story about “How Microsoft developers use AI” – Google removed the two words that turn a silly title into a real one!)

I’ve also seen Google try to claim that “AMD GPU overtakes Nvidia“, as if AMD had announced a revolutionary new graphics card, while the current version Wccftech The story is about how a single German retailer managed to sell more AMD units than Nvidia units in a single week. WccftechThe title was relatively responsible, but Google turned it into clickbait.

Then there are headlines that simply don’t make sense out of context, which is something real human editors avoid like the plague. What is “Agricultural safeguard planning 1“I mean? How about “The debate over AI tags intensifies» ?

Make no mistake, the problem isn’t just that these AI headlines are bad. It’s because Google is depriving us of our agency to market our own work, as if we had written a book and the bookstore decided to replace its cover.

We strive to create headlines that invite readers, that summarize the news responsibly, that help you understand Why a story matters right away and excites you when it’s warranted. (Does my title for this story sound exciting enough?) And yet Google seems to think it can simply replace these titles, in a way that might confuse our readers and think were those that generate clickbait, since the name of our publications appears right next to them.

Google reveals that something about this news is “Generated with AI, which can make mistakes”, but not what, and readers only see this message if they press the “See more” button:

It’s too easy for readers to think we’re intentionally sending our articles to Google Discover with these headlines.

The good news is that this is a Google experiment. If there is enough negative feedback, the company probably won’t move forward. “These screenshots show a small UI experience for a subset of Discover users,” Google spokeswoman Mallory Deleon said. The edge. “We’re testing a new design that changes the placement of existing headlines to make topic details easier to digest before they crawl links across the web.”

But the general trend at Google has been to prioritize its own products at the expense of sending clicks to news sites. Although the company swears it’s not destroying the web with AI search, it would be hard to find a media outlet that agrees, and even Google admitted in court that “the open web is already in rapid decline.”

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