Google Chrome Will Summarize Entire Articles For You With Built-in Generative AI (theverge.com) 54
Google's AI-powered Search Generative Experience (SGE) is getting a major new feature: it will be able to summarize articles you're reading on the web, according to a Google blog post. From a report: SGE can already summarize search results for you so that you don't have to scroll forever to find what you're looking for, and this new feature is designed to take that further by helping you out after you've actually clicked a link. You probably won't see this feature, which Google is calling "SGE while browsing," right away. Google says it's a new feature that's starting to roll out Tuesday as "an early experiment" in its opt-in Search Labs program. (You'll get access to it if you already opted in to SGE, but if you haven't, you can opt in to the feature on its own.) It will be available first in the Google app on Android and iOS, and the company is bringing it to the Chrome browser on desktop "in the days ahead."
Re: Tried it (Score:3)
FUD (Score:5, Insightful)
Except Google isn't a more trusted or stable company, they're generally unstable and recently untrustable.
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The particularly amusing part about it is they will do all that work for something that will turn out crap, because you cannot trust GenAI to have not missed something important in its summary or that it has not hallucinated something in it, so if the article is important to you you'll have to read it yourself -- with even more mental effort than before knowing you've been primed with potential BS.
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> Re: Google: "Wait for the more trusted, stable company [us] to do it."
Two lies in one. Three, if they don't succeed ("do").
Google once embarrassingly mixed my personal info up with my work info in their mad push to beat Facebook a while back. They decided to auto-merge accounts having the same email address as part of their one-big-app-suite plan. Auto-merge = auto-mess. When the suits are pressured to "git it done", they ride roughshod over users, and I expect this AI Space Race to be similar to their
Also not very useful (Score:2)
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Companies ruined by Brahmin (Score:2)
Companies ruined by Brahmin from India https://archive.is/tqcV0 [archive.is]
Worst news evert (Score:1)
Won't that put slashdot editors out of work though?
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Maybe. AI is notoriously bad at summarizing, so it should have no trouble producing misleading headlines and headlines that don't match either the article or summary and summaries that misrepresent the article most of time.
I'd say it was all over for Slashdot editors, but AI is unreasonably good at producing grammatically correct text consistently. That single flaw might just be enough to save their jobs.
Will they fact-check it, too? (Score:3)
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You are 100 years old and yet you talk nonsense.
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Thank You, kind human!
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If they can fact-check summaries automatically, they'll have solved some of the core problems of artificial general intelligence.
... and the accuracy of the summary is... (Score:2)
Nobody pretended the summaries are unbiased. (Score:2)
Nobody pretended the summaries are unbiased.
Making us dumber again (Score:5, Insightful)
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my only question is (Score:2)
....when we get the floaty self-powered chairs from Wall-E, does the sippy cup come with it or do you have to buy that separately?
Stealing debunked. (Score:2)
That whole "stealing news" has been debunked years ago.
Linking and taking a summary sentence is fair use.
The editors wanted to get compensated, then backpedaled when they were simply replaced by their competitors in the listings.
Great, now we can complete circle... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Author" has one short sentence of material, uses generative AI to make clickbait friendly article mindlessly verbose and meandering.
Browser has AI to get back to that original sentence.
Please, mod the parent up (Score:2)
Thanks!
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>> "Author" has one short sentence of material
I think it's the reverse :
"AI is short of authors, and just spits out BS instead"
Garbage search (Score:2)
All I get when I search Google is SEO garbage results.
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And companies pay for that shit...
goodbye nuance (Score:2)
Who needs nuance when you can reduce everything down to simple summary?
Oh goody (Score:3)
Oh Goody.
Now instead of having Google just offering me pages of stuff *almost* completely unrelated to my search, they'll also offer me summaries *almost* completely unrelated to the article?
I'm sure that will make my life SO much better! /sarcasm
Hmm, actually, maybe it will. It'll finally push Google into being completely useless, and force me to learn the advanced-search incantations for DuckDuckGo or someone else. As it is, I use them first, and then copy the exact same search into Google on the occasions when the others can't find anything relevant. But that's been getting increasingly ineffective anyway, so back to the good old days of search-engine incantations being necessary to find anything useful.
Headlines?! (Score:3)
Isn't that what the headline does anyway? (or is supposed to do?)
Why would the people who never read beyond the headline bother to read the summary?
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Kind of agree, well not the headline that is just to draw you in. However a well written article should have a summary at the top and get into the detail later. Like any good paper should have document should have some type of summary. The only types of writing that shouldn't have a summary section I can think of is fiction, where it would give away the story.
I find it funny how writing is getting worse and now we need AI fix a problem that doesn't need to be there in the first place. AI doesn't fix it anyw
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Why would the people who never read beyond the headline bother to read the summary?
Wait, there's a summary?
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Isn't that what the headline does anyway? (or is supposed to do?)
Why would the people who never read beyond the headline bother to read the summary?
Evidence: slashdot.
the articles are largely ALREADY summaries (Score:1)
people will be even less capable of critical reading and thinking
don't think it's a win to write for AI to read rather than other humans
Seriously? (Score:3)
If articles can be summarized, why do articles exist?
Reduced Attention Span (Score:2)
You must have the attention span of a fly.
Ohhhhhh.....
Ummmm....
Nevermind.....
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If articles can be summarized, why do articles exist?
A summary presents the conclusions of the article, the article provides the detail, the methodology, how conclusions were reached.
It used to be common to summarise articles, news and technical because you wanted to get the readers attention to get them to commit the time to read the article.
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If articles can be summarized, why do articles exist?
A summary presents the conclusions of the article, the article provides the detail, the methodology, how conclusions were reached. It used to be common to summarise articles, news and technical because you wanted to get the readers attention to get them to commit the time to read the article.
Also, it used to be proper in in journalistic writing to make the first 2-3 paragraphs of the essentially a summary, followed by successively-expanding levels of detail and background, so that readers can read the level of detail they're interested in, then stop.
The web seems to have made a lot of writers forget this, instead preferring a clickbait headline to draw you in, posing questions but carefully not answering them, then making you wade through endless background and detail before you get to the ke
I've used it, it's great (Score:2)
Not a good idea (Score:2)
Note, I haven’t read the whole article, but I can tell you it is a dumb idea. We already have disinformation campaigns based on headline-reading. For example Alex Jones loves to prove his point by just rattling off headlines of articles without even bothering with context or what the article actually says. Take for example the article “scientists say new galaxy is 1 billion light years away” .. he would say some BS about “how can they possibly know that, there is no way to tell how f
Summaries are useless (Score:2)
>> Note, I haven’t read the whole article, but I can tell you it is a dumb idea. :)
You are completely right, it is a dumb idea to not read the article
That's the whole point here.
Summaries are useless, so they may also be written by any BS AI...
AKA (Score:2)
Okay (Score:2)
What can go wrong ? (Score:2)
Rinse and repeat to get even cleaner results.
What can go wrong ?
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Can it also write funny comments automatically? (Score:2)
Now that would be a usefull feature so that I can spend more time reading all the contributions.
useless (Score:2)
I fail to see how this could be useful. 75% of the time, what I think is important in an article is not what the reporter thinks is important, and surely will be left out when an AI or human idiot summarizes it. Sometimes, the most important thing in an article is the information *they judiciously left out*.