By Gerrit De Vynck, The Washington PostGoogle logos are displayed when searched for Google in New York, Sept. 11, 2023.
Google’s head of search, Liz Reid, confirmed in a blog post Thursday afternoon that the company was scaling back some of the AI answers, which it calls “AI Overviews.” The company cut down on using social media posts as source material for the AI answers, is pausing some answers on health-related topics and “added triggering restrictions for queries where AI Overviews were not proving to be as helpful,” Reid said in the post.
The tech industry is in the throes of an AI revolution, with start-ups and Big Tech giants alike trying to find new ways to put the tech into their products and make money from it. Many of the tools have been launched before they’re ready for prime time, as companies jostle to be the first to market their products and cast themselves as cutting-edge.
The biggest one was a confirmation that it would begin rolling out AI-generated answers in search results to most of its users. Google has been testing the AI answers for a year with a select group of users, but adding them to more search results meant most people would now begin to interact directly with generative AI on a tool they use every day.The tech works by reading websites that would otherwise show up in Google search results and then summarizing them into multi-paragraph answers.