Like Apple, Google’s AI News Tech Misinterprets Stories, Generates Gibberish Headlines

from the screwing-up-the-basics dept

Despite all the recent hype about “AI,” the technology still struggles with very basic things and remains prone to significant errors. Which makes it maybe not the best idea to rush the nascent technology into widespread adoption in industries prone to all sorts of deep-rooted problems already (like say, health insurance, or journalism).

We’ve already seen how news outlets have gotten egg on their faces by using AI “journalists” who completely make up sources, quotes, facts, and other information. But earlier this year, Apple also had to pull their major news AI system offline after it repeatedly couldn’t generate accurate headlines, and in many instances just fabricated major events that never happened (whoops!).

Google has recently also been experimenting with letting AI generate news headlines for its Discover feature (the news page you reach by swiping right on Google Pixel phones), and the results are decidedly… mixed. The technology, once again, routinely misconstrues meaning when trying to sum up news events:

“I also saw Google try to claim that “AMD GPU tops Nvidia,” as if AMD had announced a new groundbreaking graphics card, when the actual Wccftech story is about how a single German retailer managed to sell more AMD units than Nvidia units within a single week’s span.”

Other times, it just produces gibberish:

“Then there are the headlines that simply don’t make sense out of context, something real human editors avoid like plague. What does “Schedule 1 farming backup” mean? How about “AI tag debate heats”?

Google has already redirected a ton of advertising revenue away from journalists who do actual work, and toward its own synopsis and search tech. Now it’s effectively rewriting the headlines editors and journalists (the good ones, anyway) spend a lot of time working on to try and be as accurate and inviting as possible. And they’re doing an embarrassingly shitty job of it.

Not that the media companies themselves have been doing much better. Most major American media companies are owned by people who see AI not as a way to improve journalism quality and make journalism more efficient, but as a path toward cutting corners and undermining labor.

Meanwhile, in the quest for massive engagement at impossible scale, tech giants like Meta and Google have simply stopped caring so much about quality and accuracy. The results are everywhere, from Google News’ declining quality, to substandard search results, to the slow decline of key, popular services, to platforms filled with absolute clickbait garbage. It’s not been great for informed consensus or factual reality.

You’d like to think that ultimately we emerge from the age of slop with not just better technology, but a better understanding of how to use and adapt to it. But the problem remains that most of the folks dictating the trajectory of this emerging technology have no idea what they’re doing, have prioritized making money over the public interest, or are just foundationally shitty human beings bad at their jobs.

Filed Under: ai, headlines, journalism, llms, media

Companies: google, meta