Search traffic to news sites has already plunged by a third in one year, according to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Search traffic to news sites has already plunged by a third in one year, according to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Publishers fear AI search summaries and chatbots mean'end of traffic era' Media companies expect web traffic to their sites from online searches to plummet over the next three years, as AI summaries and chatbots change the way consumers use the internet. An overwhelming majority are also planning to encourage their journalists to behave more like YouTube and TikTok content creators this year, as short-form video and audio content continues to boom. The findings are drawn from a new report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, which included the views of 280 media leaders from 51 countries.

This study examined how AI-generated summaries, which have become visually prominent in online search results, affect how users think about different issues. In a preregistered randomized controlled experiment, participants (N = 2,004) viewed mock search result pages varying in the presence (vs. absence), placement (top vs. middle), and stance (benefit-framed vs. harm-framed) of AI-generated summaries across four publicly debated topics. Compared to a no-summary control group, participants exposed to AI-generated summaries reported issue attitudes, behavioral intentions, and policy support that aligned more closely with the AI summary stance. The summaries placed at the top of the page produced stronger shifts in users' issue attitudes (but not behavioral intentions or policy support) than those placed at the middle of the page. We also observed moderating effects from issue familiarity and general trust toward AI. In addition, users perceived the AI summaries more useful when it emphasized health harms versus benefits. These findings suggest that AI-generated search summaries can significantly shape public perceptions, raising important implications for the design and regulation of AI-integrated information ecosystems.

Google's efforts to serve up AI-generated answers in search results hasn't exactly gone according to plan. When AI Overviews rolled out last summer, the feature surprised users by crafting embarrassing responses, telling them to glue cheese onto pizza, eat rocks and boogers, and set their birthday as a password. Though Google made fixes to address some of the most absurd answers, AI Overview still occasionally presents inaccurate information. But rather than retreat from AI search results, Google is doubling down. This week, the company announced it's testing a new "AI Mode" in search that replaces the typical web links that follow an Overview with a more comprehensive AI-generated summary.

Apple Intelligence is here, and I look forward to everyone sharing the bonkers/pointless #AI summaries it now puts on your lock screen. "Pugsley is little fester" is one of my faves. On @washingtonpost, I also have "Harris to endorse Harris."

From a high level, we need something akin to the medical Hippocratic oath, which governs doctors to do no harm. It's for others to decide whether that's regulation or something else, but we need a framing commitment. I often come at things from a narrative place, and I've always been struck by writer Isaac Asimov's Robot series, in which he weaves meditations around how societal principles and protections are included in the laws of robotics on an almost engineered basis. Similarly, we need someone to assert a foundational principle for all of us that AI shouldn't do harm. On balance, at the phase we're in right now, I see far more benefits than any actual realized negatives. I think what's going on in medicine alone should give people a lot of enthusiasm for the positive potential in AI.

Today Yahoo is debuting a revamped version of its news app. This new Yahoo News app, which is available as a free download now, is powered by the underlying code of the well received yet short-lived app Artifact. And, of course, the new app is infused with artificial intelligence capabilities to surface the news articles that might interest you most. Artifact was a news reader app that launched in 2023 and was helmed by Instagram cofounders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. It made heavy use of AI, employing algorithms to process user behavior and serve readers highly personalized content based on which news stories they engaged with.

When bizarre and misleading answers to search queries generated by Google's new AI Overview feature went viral on social media last week, the company issued statements that generally downplayed the notion the technology had problems. Late Thursday, the company's head of search Liz Reid admitted the flubs had highlighted areas that needed improvement, writing that "we wanted to explain what happened and the steps we've taken." One saw Google's algorithms endorse eating rocks because doing so "can be good for you," and the other suggested using nontoxic glue to thicken pizza sauce. Rock eating is not a topic many people were ever writing or asking questions about online, so there aren't many sources for a search engine to draw on. According to Reid, the AI tool found an article from The Onion, a satirical website, that had been reposted by a software company, and misinterpreted the information as factual. As for Google telling its users to put glue on pizza, Reid effectively attributed the error to a sense of humor failure.

Last week Google introduced a radical shake-up of search that presents users with AI-generated answers to their queries. Now the company says it will soon start including ads inside those AI Overviews, as the automatic answers are called. Google on Tuesday announced plans to test search and shopping ads in the AI summaries, a move that could extend its dominance in search advertising into a new era. Although Google rapidly rolled out AI Overviews to all US English users last week after announcing the feature at its I/O developer conference, it's unclear how widely or quickly ads will start appearing. Screenshots released by Google show how a user asking how to get wrinkles out of clothes might get an AI-generated summary of tips sourced from the web, with a carousel of ads underneath for sprays that purport to help crisp up a wardrobe.

Google is bringing one element of its AI-powered "Search Generative Experience" (SGE) to Google Chrome, following in the footsteps of Microsoft and its migration of Bing Chat into Edge and mainstream search experiences. Google calls this "SGE while browsing," but that's an overly complex way of putting it. What Google will be adding to the desktop version of Chrome (as well as the Google app on Android and iOS) is an AI-generated, bulleted summary of longer articles. If this sounds familiar, it should. Amazon said this week that it's adding AI summaries of user reviews on product pages, and Newegg has done the same.

At the recent tinyML Summit 2021, Raspberry Pi co-founder Eben Upton teased the future of'Pi Silicon' and it looks like machine learning could see a massive improvement thanks to Raspberry Pi's news in-house chip development team. There is a need for more boards powered by the RP2040 and partners such as Adafruit, Pimoroni, Adafruit and Sparkfun are releasing their own hardware, many with features not found on the Pico. Raspberry Pi's in house application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) team are working on the next iteration, and seems to be focused on lightweight accelerators for ultra low power machine learning applications. During Upton's talk at 40 minutes the slide changes and we see "Future Directions" a slide that shows three current generation'Pi Silicon' boards, two of which are from board partners, SparkFun's MicroMod RP2040 and Arduino's Nano RP2040 Connect. In Upton's talk he says that it is "overwhelmingly likely that there will be some other piece of silicon from Raspberry Pi".