April 18 (Punjab Khabarnama) : The other day, I was searching about “The First War of Independence” on Google, and guess what it came up with: “An AI Overview.” Not a link to another website stating the answer to my search query written by someone else, but an answer generated by Google itself!
Google has been trying to experiment with its algorithm lately and has been coming up with ways to inculcate AI in its answers and search results, without making it obvious to users, delivering its search results in a combination of several links and also AI-generated answers, allowing its users to choose for themselves. But the AI generated traffic is still very less and at its nascent stage.
The AI war is pretty evident and Google has been trying to catch up with it. With the advent of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, people have been fascinated by the generation of “human-like” answers by a machine. Also, the convenience factor is largely considered while searching for some information on the net; the ease with which we get answers on ChatGPT without having to go through the hassle of searching through multiple links to find the most appropriate answer that we want has played a huge role in this shift towards Generative AI.
The fact that Google is introducing this new feature without any big announcements and is also attaching a disclaimer at the end stating, “Because generative AI is experimental and a work in progress, it can and will make mistakes,” it is also assuring that users are fully aware that these answers are AI generated and make an informed choice for themselves.
This is a great way Google is ensuring that users don’t use other means of getting information, but are provided with google search results that have links for reference and also its own answers – it is now no longer just a search engine.