Unlike the common opinion here, I find the AI search results on top really good. 50% of times it appears it answers my question and I don't need to scroll past it to get to the actual search results.
"Appears" to me is the key word here, how do you know that what it said was true?
It will very confidently "answer" your question in a way that is convincing but if you actually try to click through you may find that the answer is straight up wrong.
I feel like most of the time that I am looking up something that is not niche but also not a major thing it does this and at best useless at worst actually harmful since people won't click through for the real information.
The biggest problem being that these systems can be right enough times that you gradually start trusting it and stop checking. Which is what google wants, if you have to check its work in the first place why does it even exist.
Edit:
Yesterday I tried using one of these research tools because I was curious and it was low priority so figured why not. I was looking for an open source solution to a problem. I specifically mentioned one that I had seen but I was cautious because it seemed to have been abandoned so was looking for others. It confidently told me how wrong I was about thinking it was abandoned despite the last commit being in early 2024 (it even said 2024 in the report) and even before that was clearly slowing down.
Now thankfully in that case it actually told me in the report the 2024 part which clearly told me how bad the report was going to be, but that is clearly bad and tainted the entire research.
It's the "it's wrong about the area I'm an expert in, but I feel it's correct in areas I'm not familiar with", but on Google's scale.
It's worse be cause it can be very subtly wrong.
edit for comment below: Its not about laziness for me. Its the displeasure of wading through junk that internet has become. I just don't have brain capacity or the smarts to outwit the scammers .
[1] If the search takes more than a few minutes then the AI overview is almost guaranteed to be wrong or useless.
Except that these tools are being positioned as a source of reliable truth and the companies are incentivized to keep you on their system (google) instead of actually pushing you to the source (unless the source is an ad).
Any disclaimer they try to put is hidden and often lighter/smaller text.
Me latching onto the "appears" does not change anything since even with your interpretation it is wrong 50% of the time and that assumes that the 50% of the time you think it is right you actually know it is right and it is not actually wrong but you never check.
If all your content is consumed and presented via a third party - how does that change the nature of "content publishing".
It's the summarisation of Wikipedia and the like on steroids.
it actually being correct is.
google ai summaries are laughably bad and it is completely unethical that google even launched this feature in its current state.
eventually we will have to admit that next token generators are fundamentally flawed as a source of trustable information.