A Google executive is defending the use of artificial intelligence in the company's search engine and says users are increasingly moving away from "actual answers" in favor of the AI Overviews feature, The Verge reports.
Google's vice president of government affairs and public policy, Markham Erickson, when asked about the Rolling Stone lawsuit, said that users are increasingly using "AI Overviews" in search, and the company's main goal is to maintain a "healthy ecosystem" that combines AI answers with regular search results.
Despite Erickson's claims, there has been previous evidence that AI Reviews are actually hurting many sites. In particular, a lawsuit by Rolling Stone's parent company, Penske Media Corporation, alleges that AI reviews are leading to lower traffic and, as a result, lower revenues for online publications.
"So I don't want to talk about the details of the lawsuit, but I can talk about our philosophy, which is that we want a healthy ecosystem. The 10 blue links [traditional search results] serve the ecosystem very well, and it was a simple value proposition. We provided links that directed users to billions of publications around the world for free. We're not going to abandon that model. We think that model makes sense. It's still an important part of the ecosystem.
But user preferences and what they want are also changing. So instead of factual answers and 10 blue links, they increasingly want contextual answers and summaries. We want to be able to provide that, and at the same time bring people back to content, valuable content on the internet. The location of that valuable content for users is changing. So it's a dynamic space. Ultimately, our goal is to ensure an overall healthy ecosystem," said Erickson.
Despite all of this, Google recently admitted in court that "the open web is in rapid decline." Before and after that trial, the company argued that the web was thriving, despite the fact that "AI Overviews" has a significant impact on traffic for many sites.