A.I. Overviews The Five Most Key Takeaways from This Blog
- Google is rolling back the A.I. Overviews feature that it recently rolled out.
- This feature offered A.I.-generated responses that would appear at the top of a Google search. These responses would function as like summarized responses to the search query. The searcher could check out that response in lieu of checking out the links lower on the search engine results page (SERP).
- The roll-back came after widespread outrage and criticism based around plenty of false or just simply weird answers. One example: recommending eating a pebble a day.
- Google has not completely taken the A.I. Overviews feature off of Google search, only restricted it to a narrower range of searches that it will show up from.
- Since this A.I. Overviews feature is still in pretty early stages, users should expect to see it again in the future.
A Familiar Pattern Has Been Emerging for Some Time Now
If you have been following A.I. for enough time now, then the pattern will seem familiar enough by now.
That is, an A.I. company publicly releases an A.I. system that is not really ready for a proper public release, if the goal is to get everybody to love the product and think it is great.
The A.I. screws up, in some places royally.
Some analysts are left scratching their heads as to why the company would choose to release the A.I. so early, when it is clearly still in beta-stage gestation.
Others who cover A.I. (and the writer of this article may be among them, or at least somewhat sympathetic to their view) see a blatant attempt to get more than one thing out of the early release. These things are:
- An opportunity to beta-test the A.I. on a wide scale across many diverse users.
- An opportunity to familiarize the public with the kind of A.I. that the company, whether the public likes it or not, will be implementing and/or selling in the coming future. This way, it will not be that big of a surprise when it becomes a permanent fixture in the users’ lives.
- An excuse, after getting this free wide-scale feedback survey and beta-testing, to pull the A.I. back to the lab and continue to develop it, instead of having to burden the company with the costs of keeping the A.I. so widely publicly available.
So, a big corporation gets egg on its face for the A.I. not being perfect, but it is a small opportunity cost to pay, in the eyes of some boardrooms surely, for the insights gained from the widespread public release.
Again, that could be way off, but it is a possible strategy at work, to get free product testing.
A.I. Overviews: The Whirlwind of Its Release
What this writer just described in rather general terms, at least the part about an A.I. system being released and people criticizing it, which results in the partial or full pulling of said A.I. system from the public’s use of it, is just what happened with Google’s A.I. Overviews.
Answers such as recommending putting glue onto pizza to make the cheese stick, which was apparently sourced from a humorous ironic Reddit post, are to blame for the disappointment.
People who have been following the A.I. world will also know that this is more or less Google’s M.O. at this point.
Think back to major releases like Bard and Gemini and, now, A.I. Overviews.
All upon release managed to garner plenty of criticism from the public that led to a withdraw for further R&D before a phoenix-ish rise from the ashes (forthcoming for A.I. Overviews, be sure of it) with another round of implementation.
The Impact on Business Owners
When A.I. Overviews comes back in better form, business owners should prepare themselves for the reality that many users will likely be using the A.I. Overview to get information.
Why does that matter for the business owner?
Well, in traditional search, this meant that the Google Search user was more likely to actually click on a link to find out information about, say, a product or service.
That is, if the business owner was putting out content on the web that observed the best practices of SEO.
Basically what this will lead to is a much more competitive cyberspace for business owners to do well in.
That will also likely lead to more opportunities for businesses to extract money from business owners that will need to place more ads on Google to do well, in addition to having the usual SEO work done to ensure that the web content is still showing up well in search engine results pages.
So, will this A.I. Overviews controversy really hurt Google in the long run? That depends on how likely it is that the majority of Internet users will stop using Google and migrate to some other search engine, one that likely has an A.I Overviews clone of its own.
This writer believes that is unlikely, and so business owners should be aware of the potential long-term impact of A.I. Overviews.
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