In AI we trust: Just weeks since Google has rolled out AI-generated summaries at the top of search results, most users are now already ignoring the old list of links below. — Photo: Karl-Josef Hildenbrand/dpa
WASHINGTON: In recent months, millions of internet users around the world have noticed artificial intelligence (AI) overviews appearing at the top of pages following a Google search, be that through an address bar or by going via the search engine.
Although there is an easy way to hide AI summaries, most internet users aren't doing so. In fact, they are even skipping looking through the traditional search results that appear underneath the AI summary, going by findings published by the Pew Research Center.
In contrast, people who did not encounter an AI summary were twice as likely to keep clicking and reading other sources, the US think tank found.
"Google users were less likely to click on result links when visiting search pages with an AI summary compared with those without one," Pew said, summarising data gathered from over 900 people who shared their browsing activity.
The research also suggests that users are already highly trusting of AI summaries, despite warnings that AI-generated text is prone to mistakes and may not be reliably sourced.
Pew said most people "very rarely" clicked through to the sources cited following searches topped with an AI-generated summary of the topic to hand, cutting traffic to news sites and other publishers.
The three most-cited sources for the AI-generated summaries were Reddit, Wikipedia and YouTube, according to Pew, which said that government websites were more likely to appear as sources in AI write-ups than in search results.
Longer queries, such as those framed as sentences or questions, are typically more likely to lead to Google churning out an AI summary than when a search query is kept to a word or two. – dpa
