Google CEO Sundar Pichai announces AI products at Google's I/O conference in Mountain View, Calif., on May 14. Google began putting the artificial intelligence answers on top of search results for users in the United States two weeks ago, but users and search engine experts on Thursday began noticing that far fewer queries were triggering an AI answer compared with previous days.Thursday afternoon that the company was scaling back some of the AI answers, which it calls “AI Overviews.
Google, whose employees invented much of the tech underlying breakthrough AI tools like ChatGPT, has been trying to prove to investors, consumers and its own employees that it is still the most important player in the industry. At its I/O conference this month, the company made more than 100 different AI-related announcements.The biggest one was a confirmation that it would begin rolling out AI-generated answers in search results to most of its users.
The tech works by reading websites that would otherwise show up in Google search results and then summarizing them into multi-paragraph answers., accusing the company of hurting their businesses by taking their content and regurgitating it for users directly in search results, depriving them of important web traffic.
But journalists, search engine experts and social media users quickly began spotting problems with the answers. Some of the responses were funny while others were concerning. They showed up on sensitive queries as well, including health-related ones.One answer, which Google has since fixed, told people to drink plenty of urine to help pass a kidney stone. Another said John F.
Google tried to test the tool as much as it could before the broader rollout, but Reid said the full-scale launch revealed many situations the company hadn’t prepared for.