Google claims the AI Overview on every search result — a frequently-wrong summary of other people’s work — sends a ton of clicks back to the original publishers they ripped off. This is false. Pew …
If I’m not mistaken, even in pre-LLM days, Google had some kind of automated summaries which were sometimes wrong. Those bothered me less. The AI hallucinations appear to be on a whole new level of wrong (or is this just my personal belief - are there any statistics about this?).
Pre-LLM summaries were for the most part actually short.
They were more directly lifted from human written sources, I vaguely remember lawsuits or the threat of lawsuits by newspapers over google infoboxes and copyright infringement in pre-2019 days, but i couldn’t find anything very conclusive with a quick search.
They didn’t have the sycophantic—hey look at me I’m a genius—overly-(and wrong)-detailed tone that the current batch has.
Convenience is king, and never mind accuracy.
If I’m not mistaken, even in pre-LLM days, Google had some kind of automated summaries which were sometimes wrong. Those bothered me less. The AI hallucinations appear to be on a whole new level of wrong (or is this just my personal belief - are there any statistics about this?).
Subjectively speaking: