Why Google AI Overviews have become so intrusive and creepy.
I've been thinking about this quite a bit. At first, it seemed that AI
Overviews only appeared if you asked a specific question or very
nearly so. That the AIO was displayed even for personal questions
seemed not entirely unreasonable, since, after all, you did ask.
But now, AIOs are appearing for most queries that consist only of
isolated search terms, with no specific question asked. Yet Google is
letting their AI make ASSUMPTIONS about what it thinks is the
"assumed" question that might be derived from your query words.
Sometimes the assumption is correct. Often it's laughable wrong. But
it's frequently creepy as hell. And often feels extremely intrusive.
Because if you'd wanted to ask a specific question, you would have. If
you just are looking for INFORMATION that involves those terms, the
appropriate response would be the links to associated sites where you
could pick out the ones relevant to your actual search.
It is ENTIRELY inappropriate for Google to ASSUME your state of mind
regarding your search terms in non-question cases, and it feels like
some invasive creep is looking over your shoulder and interjecting
when you didn't ask him/her/it to do so.
This is especially bad since Google refuses to provide an account
level setting to turn off AI Overviews for users who do not want this
kind of -- let's face it -- sickly privacy invasive -- behavior on the
part of Search.
Google should provide a way for logged in users to turn off AI
Overviews as a global setting. And in any case, Google's AI Overviews
should stop behaving like a pervert.
L
- - -
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
[email protected] (https://www.vortex.com/lauren)
Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com
Mastodon: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren
Signal: By request on need to know basis
Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org
PRIVACY Forum: https://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility
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