If you dream of an AI-free internet, keep dreaming. Google continues to inject AI into every facet of its ecosystem. Now the Reaper has come for the mobile search app’s Discover section, adding AI-generated summaries of the listed articles. Before you blow a gasket over the search company intercepting more websites’ traffic, it promises to add a source and a disclaimer to remedy the theft. How generous of them.
Google blows up Discover
The Discover section on the mobile Google Search and Chrome apps, though often overlooked, is one of the more reliable pipelines to send users to news sites and blogs. The section feeds users newly published stories based on their search history. Readers will be familiar with Google’s Gemini-generated summaries on search queries; this is now being added to Discover, with the information source and a “Generated with AI, which can make mistakes” disclaimer so you don’t get confused.
It’s unclear how extensive these summaries will be, whether they will be added sporadically, or if they will be applied to all articles. Either way, this is Google adapting the ChatGPT model of consuming originally-produced content on the internet to feed users its own answers without linking to the relevant content. The feature is only promised for US users for now, with no word on a global rollout.
At least web security company Cloudflare plans to charge AI companies for crawling the websites it hosts and protects, which is up to 20% of the websites on the internet. Hopefully, others follow suit. The company says the value of clicks will not be based on volume but on the quality of the information, possibly the first shot fired in the coming bidding wars for quality training data. And as long as original training data is needed, the humans who can produce it will remain necessary. To feed the machine.
