is a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
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In early December, I brought you the news that Google has begun replacing Verge headlines, and those of our competitors, with AI clickbait nonsense in its content feed. Google appeared to be backing away from the experiment, but now tells The Verge that its AI headlines in Google Discover are a feature, one that “performs well for user satisfaction.” I once again see lots of misleading claims every time I check my phone.
Like I explained last month, these AI headlines are akin to a bookstore replacing the covers of the books it puts on display — only here, the “bookstore” is the news tab that appears when you swipe right on the homescreen of a Samsung Galaxy or Google Pixel phone, and the “cover” might be a AI-generated lie instead of the truth.
For example, Google’s AI claimed last week that “US reverses foreign drone ban,” citing and linking to this PCMag story for the news. That’s not just false — PCMag took pains to explain that it’s false in the story that Google links to!
From PCMag’s story, bolding theirs:
I saw a headline saying that the drone ban was dropped. Is that true? No. While it’s true the Commerce Department ended its efforts to restrict DJI and other drones from import in Jan. 2026, it only did so because it would be redundant in the wake of the FCC actions. The Commerce Department is a separate entity from the FCC, and its proposed restrictions were never put in place to begin with. Some reports on the Commerce Department’s decision have misleading headlines that could make you think the government did an about-face, so I don’t blame you for being confused.
What does the author of that PCMag story think? “It makes me feel icky,” Jim Fisher tells me over the phone. “I’d encourage people to click on stories and read them, and not trust what Google is spoon-feeding them.”
He says Google should be using the headline that humans wrote, and if Google needs a summary, it can use the ones that publications already submit to help search engines parse our work.
Google claims it’s not rewriting headlines. It characterizes these new offerings as “trending topics,” even though each “trending topic” presents itself as one of our stories, links to our stories, and uses our images, all without competent fact-checking to ensure the AI is getting them right.
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