Ottawa-News publishers say that AI-Janit Summary which is now cut in the top several Google search results in their online traffic-and experts are still giving green signal to concerns about the accuracy of summary as they warn that the Internet is being resumed.
When Google rolled out its AI observation feature last year, its mistakes – which includes a suggestion to use glue to improve pizza topping – in better headlines. An expert worries about the accuracy of the output of the facility, not necessarily technology improves.
Jessica Johnson, a senior partner from the Center for Media, Technology and Democracy, McGill University, said, “This is one of the very comprehensive technology changes that have changed the way to find us … and therefore live our lives, without a big public discussion,” said a senior partner of McGill University, Technology and Democracy.
“As a journalist and as a researcher, I worry about accuracy.”
While users have marked mistakes in the AI-mangoing summary, there is no educational research yet to define the range of the problem. A report released by the BBC earlier this year had a AI chatbots from Google, Microsoft, Openai and Perplexity, which was found “significant impurities” in their summations of news stories, although it did not especially watch Google AI overview.
In small fonts at the bottom of its AI summary, Google has warned users that “AI reactions may include mistakes.”
The company maintains the accuracy of the AI summary, with other search features, such as providing snippets especially snipped.
A Google spokesperson said in a statement, “As people use AI interviews, we see that they are happy with their results, and they come to Google to ask more about their questions.” “The vast majority of the AI interview are highly factual and we have continued to improve the reactions and quality.”
Chirag Shah, a professor at AI and online discovery of Washington University, said how the error rate AI system works.
The generative AI does not understand the concepts the way people do. Instead, it works by making predictions based on huge quantity of training data. Shah said that there is a “no check” before getting information from the documents of the system and generating the results.
“What if those documents are flawed?” He said. “What if some of them have wrong information, old information, satire, satire?”
A person would know that a person who suggests adding glue to the pizza is saying a joke, he said, but there will not be an artificial intelligence system.
This is a “fundamental problem” that cannot be “more calculated and solved by more data and more time,” Shah said – and better technology can actually make the problem worse.
“If anything, I worry that they will be so good … people will be quite comfortable with them that we will trust them what their abilities are,” he said.
He said that online search in general is changing in a fundamental way. As Google integrates AI in its popular search function, other AI companies are acting as generic AI systems, such as Openai’s chatgpt, self -search engine.
The search engines were originally designed to help users find their way around the Internet, Shah said, but now the goals of those who design online platforms and services, the user is to achieve in the same system.
“If it gets consolidated … it is essentially the end of the free web,” he said. “I think this is a fundamental and very important change, not only the search but the web, internet operates. And this should worry about all of us.”
A study by the Pew Research Center was less likely to click on a link from the beginning of this year when their discovery resulted in the AI summary. While users clicked 15 percent of the time link in response to a conventional search result, they only clicked on the link to include AI summary.
This is the cause of alarm for news publishers in both Canada and abroad.
Paul Degan News Media is CEO of Canada, which represents Canadian news publishers. He said that the AI summary news is working as a drag on the online engagement of media outlets.
“There is zero revenue for zero click publisher,” Degan said.
Alfred Harmida, professor at the Journalism School, British Columbia, said that Google used to be a major source of traffic for news outlets.
“People will find something on the web, find a link to a news story and think, oh, it seems interesting, I will click and read it. Of course, if you have an AI summary, it is done for you,” he explained.
“When you have most people who are casual news consumers … AI summary may be sufficient.”
Last month, a group of independent publishers submitted a complaint to the UK competition and the market authority and said that the AI overview was causing significant damage to them.
Caldon Besty, Executive Director of the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project, said that playing is an issue of competition and can be a case “potentially” under the Canadian law.
He said that Google was killed in the past with matters of competition, including one, in which the company lost a no -confidence suit on its dominance in search by the US Department of Justice.
“We have a single company that has a front door to the Internet,” Best said. “As we proceed to such a narrow approach, whether it is an AI summary or a chatbot interaction, it is really another repetition of the same worries in my mind.”
In a post last week, Liz Reid, head of Google’s search, said “Organic Click Volume” is “relatively stable year-to-year” from “Organic Click Volume” to websites.
Reid stated that the pattern “reports” third-party reports reports that incorrectly suggest dramatic decline in traffic-often flawed functioning, isolated examples, or traffic changes that had taken out before the rolls out of AI features in search. “
He said that Google “from passion – perhaps more than any other company – cares about the health of the web ecosystem.”
Clifton Van Der Linden, an associate professor and director at the Digital Society Lab at McMaster University, said many AI summary are accurate.
“I think you are looking at these rapidly changing dynamics in referral traffic, because users find these AI-borne summs useful … but useful is not necessarily reliable, official or equal to correct,” he said.
He said that if users bypass the link of a news site due to AI-borne summary, the Canadian media “reduces an existing problem”, which is dealing with the ban on news links on Facebook and Instagram.
The Liberal government of Justin Trudeau passed the online news Act in 2023, so that Meta and Google are required to compensate for news publishers for the use of their content. In response, Meta blocked the news material from its platforms in Canada, while Google has started paying under the law.
The future of that law seems uncertain. Prime Minister Mark Carney indicated last week that it was open to cancel it.
Johnson said the Canadian media has now experienced “one or two punch”-first from the news link that draws meta and now from the emergence of AI search engines.
“The issue is, and other publishers have raised it, if anyone is not going to pay for it, what does it mean to produce this work, and they can’t even see it?”
This report of Canadian Press was first published on 13 August 2024.
Anja Kardglija, Canadian Press