You're being plagiarised

Hi Reader,

Google’s AI overviews stink.

Its generative AI tool tool is crawling websites of all sizes.

Then, it’s summarizing what it finds, plonking the results on page zero without permission, or investigating if the output is true.

The result?

A bizarre set of search results.

One AI overview suggested putting nontoxic glue in your pizza.

Another suggested the key to staying healthy is eating three rocks a day.

And another said parrots can do a variety of jobs, including working as toy makers, prison inmates, and engineers.

Google’s AI doesn’t always get it wrong.

And it will improve.

In many cases, it nicely summarizes what it finds.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai says it will improve the web.

I’m not sure about that one…

Nobody wants to read bland, boring AI content.

But the whole débâcle reeks of automated plagiarism, too.

Who gave Google permission to use content that publishers invested time and money into creating for its own product?

And that’s only one type of plagiarism to watch out for online these days.

Write on,

Bryan Collins