AI mistakes won’t impede progress

Google will continue to develop artificial intelligence features despite current and potential problems, according to Liz Reid, the company’s head of Search.

Meaning. When it comes to AI in Search, Google will continue to take thoughtful risks, conduct extensive testing and respond quickly to any issues, Reid said during an all-hands meeting last week, CNBC reported.

Why do we care? Google is evolving from a classic search engine to an answer engine. This transition will not be quick or easy. There is a lot we still don’t know about how AI overviews will impact our search strategies and performance.

What Google says. Here’s some of what Reid said at the meeting:

• “It’s important that we don’t hold back features just because there may be occasional problems, but as we find them, we fix them.
• “I don’t think we should deduce from this that we shouldn’t take risks. We should take them thoughtfully. We should act urgently. When we find new problems, we must test extensively, but we won’t always find everything and that just means we respond.
• “In fact, people created templates for how to generate social engagement by creating fake AI overviews, so that’s something additional we’re thinking about.
• “No matter how many red teams we make, we will need to make more.
• “We not only have to understand the quality of the site or the page, we have to understand each passage of a page.
• “Whenever you see problems, they can be small or big. Please file them.”

AI problems. AI-generated answers that appeared in Google’s recently released AI overviews were criticized for giving dangerous and incorrect answers, such as running with scissors, cooking with glue, eating rocks, and drinking urine.

• Google said some of the AI ​​Overview screenshots were fake, while others were due to data gaps (also known as information gaps). The company said it “found a content policy violation in fewer than one in 7 million unique queries in which AI Overviews appeared.”