Google’s Discover page is a dedicated hub for news stories and other info, giving you a convenient way to catch up on your favorite topics. The company has been injecting polarizing AI-generated summaries into Discover, but it’s now taking things a step further with some truly awful AI-generated headlines.
The Verge discovered that Google is replacing news headlines in Discover with AI-generated titles. Unfortunately, these AI alternatives are ridiculously bad and frequently incorrect. These headlines are often boring or veer deeply into clickbait territory, too.
For example, a PC Gamer story had the original title “‘Child labor is unbeatable’: Baldur’s Gate 3 players discover how to build an army of unkillable kids through the power of polymorph and German media laws.” However, Google replaced this headline with the AI-generated title, “BG3 players exploit children.”
Meanwhile, a 9to5Google article had the title “Don’t buy a Qi2 25W wireless charger hoping for faster speeds – just get the ‘slower’ one instead.” Google chose to replace this with the AI-generated headline “Qi2 slows down older Pixels.”
Google’s AI also generated the title “Steam Machine price revealed” for an Ars Technica story that doesn’t reveal the price at all. Either way, the search giant is churning out four-word headlines of mostly crappy quality.
A Google representative told The Verge that this was just a test for now rather than a full-scale feature release:
These screenshots show a small UI experiment for a subset of Discover users. We are testing a new design that changes the placement of existing headlines to make topic details easier to digest before they explore links from across the web.
This statement suggests that these AI-generated titles won’t see a broad release, at least not in their current state. Nevertheless, it’s concerning that Google saw fit to push this experiment out to any users in the first place when the results are so obviously awful. There’s also no visible label or disclosure that this is an AI-generated title, and no disclosure that Google is behind these headlines rather than a publisher. So we can see more than a few readers getting angry at publications after being duped by a low-effort clickbait title.