Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

Written by: Martin Dale Bolima, Tech Journalist, AOPG.

When things are working wonders, they’re best left as is.

It’s the “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” school of thought.

And, apparently, Google didn’t get the memo not to mess up a good thing when it made AI Overviews, one of the company’s flagship announcements in the recently concluded Google I/O Developer Conference.

Granted, AI Overviews isn’t the only announcement Google made, but it’s the one getting a lot of attention—and not for the right reasons.

Users Are Not Feeling Google’s AI Overviews

To put it bluntly, Google dropped the ball with AI Overviews, a newly introduced search feature that summarises web content using Google’s in-house Large Language Model (LLM). With AI Overviews, users signed into Google who search for general topics will see AI-summarised content from different independent sources—essentially a mash-up of information from God knows where.

And that’s how the tech monolith messed up a good thing; a working model we have come to know simply as Google search. The old guard, so to speak, was doing its job just fine, and we were doing just as well. We got things done because Google search got things done. AI Overviews, at least in its current iteration, will only complicate things, making search a bit harder and maybe even more confusing.

Rolled out initially in the US, AI Overviews has been widely criticised by frustrated Google users, with the chief complaint being inaccurate or misleading information—like drinking two quarts of urine to pass kidney stones—shown as a search result. Users are also lamenting the slight delay in displaying search results as Google summarises the content, as well as the feature’s seeming propensity to include repetitive and sometimes useless details—leading some to ask for a way to turn off AI Overviews (there is, at the moment, no way to disable it).

Web publishers—including online news and media outlets—are understandably spooked as well, fearing an inevitable decline in clicks AI Overviews may cause in the long run. The fear is that with search results summarised already, users will have less motivation to click through different websites, adversely affecting their capacity to monetise their content—and depressing already meagre profits.

Just Google Putting All Its Eggs in the AI Basket

Indeed, AI Overviews (also called “Search Generative Experience”) has disrupted a working status quo—possibly because Google wants to score more points in the Great AI Race of today. And, really, the flagship conference essentially showed Google’s unfettered dalliance with AI, warts and all.

At Google I/O, the billion-dollar tech giant also unveiled:

• A supercharged AI model with a context window of 2 million tokens.
• Various AI helpers across Google Workspace (including Gmail, Drive, and Docs).
• New tools to integrate Google AI into developers’ apps.
• Project Astra, Google’s ambitious long-term vision of an AI that can respond to not only text and images (sights), but also sounds, voice, and text combined.

That’s a lot of AI, and none of it is at all surprising. Like it or not, AI has tickled people’s fancy, and Big Tech will push the narrative accordingly. Andrew Martin, Group Publisher at Asia Online Publishing Group, surmises in his weekly tech rant, there’s a conscious effort on the part of tech companies to crowbar AI into their messaging—regardless of how much impact AI actually makes.

“If you are not sick of hearing how everything is now AI powered you soon will be…” he said in his rant, adding, “Remove the word AI from the press release and the benefits being touted are the same benefits we have heard being touted for years before AI came to save us.”

It’s possible the same can be said about Google’s latest announcements at Google I/O—that Google is simply riding the AI wave, even if there’s really nothing new and compelling being offered.

AI Overviews is a perfect case in point: A supposedly AI-powered search feature that has proven to be a step back for Google’s beloved search function rather than a step forward. The AI-enhanced Workspace might hold some promise in terms of increasing productivity but offers nothing that even comes close to groundbreaking—unless you count the ability to summarise troves of emails and a souped-up Smart Reply as such.

Of course, the final verdict remains to be seen. While it is entirely plausible Google has served up a nothing burger with its latest round of AI-related announcements, it is just as possible that there’s a homeroom somewhere—an innovation that will actually serve a critical purpose or make a big difference, whether for companies or everyday consumers.

Until then, all that is just some trendy AI-speak.

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