Google Experiments With Multi-Paragraph AI News Overviews

0:00Google is currently testing AI-powered article overviews on some news publications on Google news. Now this is basically I think every news publication's worst nightmare but in this case many of them are opting into this and I think the reason behind it shows some interesting psychology and an interesting state of online news today and also the way these AI companies are pitching to make this seem like a more attractive offer. So we're going to get into all of that on the show today but before we do I wanted to mention if you've ever wanted to try all of the different AI models I talk about on the show today we're going to be talking about Gemini a lot make sure to go check out AIbox.ai.

0:37That's my own startup where you can get access to over 40 of the top AI models and compare all of them side by side. So you can get Gemini or Grok or Claude or OpenAI's ChatGPT to all answer the same question. You can compare them side by side inside of the chat and you can switch between all of them while you're having the same chat conversation. You might want ChatGPT to analyze something for you and then you get Claude to go and rewrite it in a way that has a better tone like Claude does or get Grok to say something unhinged. There's a lot of options. You also have image generators, a ton of great ones in there, including OpenAI's image generator and AI audio with 11Lab.

1:12So go check it out. I'll link in the description, AIbox.ai. All right, let's talk about what's going on with Google. So Google has their new AI powered article overviews. And what I will say is this is only on participating publications. So the news companies that are doing this with OpenAI or with Google have opted into this. The news publishers that are currently working on this, there's Der Spiegel, right, out of Germany. There's El Pai, Foha, Infobar, Compass. So, you know, right off the bat, these are a bunch of big journals, but in other countries. Then we have over here in, you know, English-speaking places, The Guardian, The Times of India, The Washington Examiner, and The Washington Post.

1:51There's a bunch of others, but those are kind of some of the main ones. What I think is interesting here, this isn't just English, this is going on in a whole bunch of different countries. The purpose of this new, it's called a commercial partnership, but it's essentially to quote unquote, explore how AI can drive more engaged audiences. This is what Google said in their most recent blog post. So for me, what's interesting here is the way that they're, they're kind of pitching this in a blog post to the world, but also you can imagine this is how they're pitching it directly to these news organizations is this is going to drive more engaged audiences.

2:19And so part of this is essentially that the company is going to work with these publishers. They're going to experiment with some new features in Google News. And one of those is this AI powered article overview. So the way Google pitches this is they say that users are going to get more context before they click through to read the article, right? So you can get this whole overview. It gives you an idea of what the article is about before you click on it. I think what that also could mean is that you're going to get fewer clicks on news articles, right? Because if I could just get the whole, you know, overview right there, and I don't feel like If there's any details in that overview that I need to see, like an infographic or like a detailed chart breakdown of something, I'm probably not going to click on it.

2:56And so for that, the participating companies are going to get direct payments from Google to make up for a potential decrease in traffic to their site, which is really interesting to see what's going on here. So you can see this from a couple different angles. From the news organization side, I think many of them will opt in because they feel like, well, perhaps their Google traffic is already going down. Google's already doing these summaries on, you know, Google, just on the regular Google website. But for that, it's a little bit easier because Google, if you just are searching for like a news story, Google give you a summary of what's going on.

3:28And that's a little bit trickier because all these news organizations are competing against every other news organization to be the article that you see and click on in relation to a specific topic. So in that regard, it's kind of I think there's like a lot of competition and they're like, there's nothing really they can say. Google could have been summarizing from anyone or everyone, and it's impossible to kind of pinpoint that down. Where it gets a little trickier is now these news organizations are allowing them to do it on their full news page. So like in Google News, you can go to Forbes or you could go to CNN and they will have a whole feed of that organization's news things.

4:02And those technically could be summarized, which means you just get way less clicks on articles where maybe the headline and, you know, three sentences can explain basically everything inside of the article. Now, I think that actually brings up a whole nother topic of like how much of articles that we see online is necessary for us to read and how much could be summarized in a few bullet points. And maybe if it can be, it should be to save us time and energy. But then again, I also feel like when I read a book versus reading an article, just the amount of time I spend reading a book on a spurt and topic makes me more likely to act on the knowledge I get there.

4:33So maybe there's something to making things longer just for longer's sake. I don't know. I'm sure there's an argument there. Here's what I think is interesting. This isn't the first time that Google has introduced these AI summaries for the news. In particular, in July, they rolled out AI summaries in the Discover tab, which is on Android phones, which is essentially the main news feed inside of Google's search app as well. And with this, users are not going to see a single headline from a major publication in the feed like we used to. Instead, you're just going to see the logo of a bunch of different news publishers in the top corner and then an AI-generated summary that cites the sources.

5:05So if you want to click through to different sources, you can. But I think news publishers see Google, it's like making a deal with the devil because Google's already summarizing and doing it. Google's like, well, we can make you a little bit happier if you want to like directly summarize your specific article instead of everybody else's and we'll pay you for that. But Google has some other cool things I do think are less deal with the devil, where maybe they're like interesting, useful features. They're experimenting with an audio briefing for people who want to listen to the news rather than read it as part of the new pilot program.

5:32But again, there's nothing to say that that audio briefing is going to just be for your news organization. Google could just make a consolidation of what everyone's saying, and then it's hard to pinpoint down, and they don't necessarily have to pay anyone for it. And the other thing that I think is interesting is if Google's giving you the direct payments, let's say it really is a way to get more engaged readers, which, I mean, it just means less readers but have more intent. So engaged readers doesn't mean that much. But if you're really just going to get more engaged users and you're usually Google paying you, it's kind of interesting because Google can do what many other organizations do where Google essentially, let's say everyone opts in for this and no one's getting paid ad revenue because everyone's just getting paid from Google for their news and that's like their income stream.

6:16Well, Google can change how much they pay. They can scale it down if they feel like they don't want to pay as much anymore and you basically have run out of other options. Or they can start taking fees off of it and say, you know, like, we will make you the payment, but like our processing fees, 5 % or yada yada. So like, I think Google has a lot of control as soon as they start controlling all of the payments going to news organizations. And that's probably what news organizations would like to avoid. What I will say is Google says that all of the features are going to include really clear attribution and a link to the article when they're doing the vocal one.

6:47Google is also partnering with a bunch of different organizations, Estado, Antara, Yonhap, the Associated Press to incorporate real-time information results into the Gemini app. So they will be paying licensing for that, but that is a separate deal. This is what they said in their blog post. They said, as the way people consume information evolves, we'll continue to improve our product for people around the world and engage with feedback from stakeholders across ecosystem. We're doing this work in collaboration with websites and creators of all sizes from major news publications to news and to new and emerging voices.

7:16So they're doing this in a lot of different places where they're consolidating information with AI and repackaging it as Gemini, essentially, which is interesting because you can see YouTube videos, you can get an AI summary. So the creator is getting kind of the same things happening to creators or probably social media with something like YouTube shorts, like you could probably just get a summary of that, what's what's taught in there. So it's very interesting to feel like Google essentially is becoming the owner of all of the information in the world. and I think as part of Google's announcement that they just did they're also launching something called preferred sources they're rolling this out globally and they'll they'll have it first in India and the U.S.

7:54or I think they first had in India in the U.S. it's now going global but essentially it lets users select their favorite news sites and blogs to appear in the top story section of Google search before you know they kind of picked it you know someone that's you know left-leaning might not like Fox News someone that's right-leaning might not like CNN so you could kind of like optimize that way and and pick what news sources you like some people have said well it's gonna make everyone an echo chamber but i think at the end of the day like users would like to get a choice in what they see so i think that is something that makes it more customizable people will request soon this is going to be available for english language users worldwide and google is going to roll it out to all supported languages earlier next year i think this is interesting to watch as google consolidates power around this information and it feels like it's you know, they probably feel like it's out of necessity because sites like ChatGPT are getting 800 million weekly active users.

8:45And that is a massive percentage of people that used to ask all of those questions to Google themselves. And it feels like, you know, ChatGPT is pulling away from Google. And so perhaps Google feels like they need to pull away from some other source like journals and news publications and other places like that, you know, even creators with YouTube AI summaries. So it's going to be very interesting to see what happens and how these companies try to keep the revenue up while everything is changing dramatically if there will be a revolt from news publishers or from influencers or YouTubers or other people in regards to all of that if people aren't getting properly compensated.

9:17So I'll keep you up to date on all of that. Thank you so much for tuning into the podcast today. If you enjoyed the episode, make sure to leave a rating and review wherever you get your show. It really helps the show out to grow and I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day. Make sure to check out AIbox.ai. As always, I'll leave a link in the description and I'll catch you in the next episode.