Google Is Using AI Again to Manipulate Headlines.
Last December, news outlets noticed that Google was experimenting with the headlines of articles appearing in Discover. It turned out that this was Google’s experiment with AI-generated headlines; instead of showing readers the headlines the publications themselves had written, Google’s AI took it upon itself to rewrite them. Why? According to Google, it was “a small user experience experiment for some Discover users” that “changes the layout of existing headlines to make it easier to digest information about a topic.” While those of us who actually write headlines argue that such an experiment is unnecessary, Google apparently disagrees, as the experiment is now a feature .
Artificial intelligence may influence publications in Google search results.
The thing is, Google isn’t content with keeping AI-generated headlines exclusive to Discover. As The Verge noted , the company is now expanding its AI-powered headline rewriting capabilities to Google Search. This means that if you click on an article on a Google Search page, it might have a headline that the publication had nothing to do with. Of course, when you go to the article itself, you’ll see the real headline. Google again claims this is an experiment—”small” and “narrow”—and that in its current state, the feature isn’t ready for full deployment. But The Verge claims to have found numerous examples of Google taking its own articles and changing their headlines for Search.
For example, the AI turned the headline “I Used an AI Tool to Cheat About Everything, and It Didn’t Work” into “An AI Tool to Cheat About Everything.” Sure, the article is about the “Chat About Everything” tool, but the AI version misses important context: The Verge isn’t simply covering the tool, or worse, endorsing it; it’s strongly criticizing it—something the original headline was meant to advertise to readers. In another example, the headline “Smart Lego Bricks Can’t Replace the Battery—and Many of Their Sensors Aren’t Active Yet” was changed to “Smart Lego Bricks Can’t Replace the Battery.” At least in this case, the story isn’t rephrased, but part of it is omitted entirely. Finally, there’s the query “I met Olaf, the robot from Frozen who might be the future of Disney parks,” which Google’s AI clumsily shortened to “the robot from Frozen who might be the future of Disney parks.” Yes, for some reason the article “the” is written in lowercase in the search.
Why is Google doing this?
The Verge acknowledges that Google has changed far fewer headlines in Search than in Discover, meaning the likelihood of seeing an AI-generated headline in Google Search is much lower than when scrolling through the Discover feed. However, judging by the progress of this feature in Discover, Google will only increase the number of AI-generated headlines in Search in the near future.
Google told The Verge that the goal is to “identify content on a page whose headline is helpful and relevant to a user’s query” and apply “more relevant headlines to user queries and promote engagement with web content.” This experiment is apparently not limited to news articles, and if Google were to launch such a feature, it would not use generative AI to rewrite headlines. So why use generative AI to rewrite headlines in an experiment? In this regard, The Verge claims that sometimes Google’s AI uses its own headline, but the wrong version. Publications like The Verge sometimes create two versions of a headline: one for the website and one that appears in search results. Google’s AI reportedly swaps headlines, choosing the website’s headline for search, while The Verge wrote an entire headline specifically for search.
Google Search, of course, belongs to Google, and we all depend on the company when it comes to what appears in search results. But it seems a bit outrageous to change a website’s title when it comes to its search rankings, whether it’s a partial shortening or a complete overhaul. If readers click a link thinking they’ll get one thing and find something else, who benefits? I imagine Google thinks it benefits itself, but like many of the changes the company has made in recent years, it doesn’t actually benefit anyone else.