Last month, Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, introduced a new feature for the company’s search engine: AI Overviews. This feature was designed to offer detailed summaries of the information just above more typical search results. Some examples of queries made to the Google Search engine which produced summaries in artificial intelligence were demonstrated in the Google I/O 2024 event. But the same queries do not return any AI summaries now as mentioned in the report of The New York Times.
Google shuts its AI overviews feature
Google on Thursday announced it was restricting the output of its new search function which uses artificial intelligence after it was accused of providing wrong answers to users. We find out later that Google will ban its use of AI overviews after the tool produced “strange, misleading or irrelevant” resumes that went viral on social networks. This the company announced on May 30, as a result of Google offering several strange and wrong results to the consumers.
New data from an SEO firm BrightEdge showed that Google is presenting people with AI Overviews far less often since the feature and the frequency were already decreasing before the controversy. The firm has been observing the appearance of Google’s AI answers to a list of tens of thousands of sample searches since the feature was launched in the previous year in the beta version.
The major reason behind Google’s decision
With the development of artificial intelligence in contemporary society, Google has developed a new tool called Google AI Overview. This feature is to offer abstracts of information below standard links in search engine results. However, it was recently accused of providing wrong summary information. That is why at the moment Google has had to temporarily disable this feature which offered rather bizarre suggestions for some search terms. This decision was made because the users and critics complained about the AI Overview feature.