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Google's AI Overviews Can Scam You. Here's How to Stay Safe
Beyond mistakes or nonsense, deliberately bad information being injected into AI search summaries is leading people down potentially harmful paths. These days, rather than showing you the traditional list of links when you run a search query, Google is intent on throwing up AI Overviews instead: synthesized summaries of information scraped off the web, with some word-prediction magic added, and packaged together in a way to sound as accurate and reliable as possible. We've written before about some of the problems with these AI Overviews, which regularly contain mistakes or nonsense, and of course rip off the work of the human writers who actually know the answers to the questions you're putting into Google. There's another problem though--these AI answers can actually be dangerous. As with every other new technology through history, scams are now making their way into AI Overviews as well, apparently injecting Google's AI answers with fraudulent phone numbers that you shouldn't trust.
Why are experts sounding the alarm on AI risks?
Why are experts sounding the alarm on AI risks? In recent months, artificial intelligence has been in the news for the wrong reasons: use of deepfakes to scam people, AI systems used to manipulate cyberattacks, and chatbots encouraging suicides, among others. Experts are already warning against technology going out of control. Researchers with some of the most prominent AI companies have quit their jobs in recent weeks and publicly sounded the alarm about fast-paced technological development posing risks to society. But the recent slew of public resignations by those tasked with ensuring AI remains safe for humanity is making conversations around how to regulate the technology and slow its development more urgent, even as billions are being generated in AI investments.