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People eating lead in their food don't know it's there.

People engaging with the AI built into Google results pages can see it, and assumedly Google's A/B testing showed that they engaged with it.

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Bait and switch user interfaces to insert AI into places AI did not previously exist and make sure you see an AI answer before anything else is not far divorced from the "lead in food" example - especially when paired with efforts to make the 10 Blue Links become irrelevant garbage on average by ignoring most of the words you type in.

Maybe it's a better analogy to compare this to food-without-lead costing 10 times as much as food-with-lead in large part because of direct actions undertaken by lead manufacturers.

Google also serves ads, most people have gotten pretty good at ignoring them while the ads simultaneously being used enough to be profitable. Similarly, A/B testing only shows whether the net result is positive (by some measure to Google's interest) - not that most people engaged (or engaged positively) with it.

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