Google is expanding AI Reviewsa feature that aggregates answers to complex questions from the web and presents them at the top of traditional search results, six more countries — India, Japan, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, and the United Kingdom — with support for local languages and English starting Thursday.
It’s been less than three months since AI Views launched in the US and immediately informed the people eating rocks and putting glue on their pizzas. Bringing them to millions more people begs the question: How to prevent the next sticky pizza fiasco in a foreign country?
“It’s a tough space,” Hema Budaraju, senior director of search product management at Google, told Engadget. “Understanding internet-wide quality in all these languages is a difficult challenge, and integrating LLMs (large language models) is not easy. It is very important to use artificial intelligence to understand languages better.
To avoid a sticky pizza situation in Hindi or Japanese, Google said it’s doing language-specific testing of AI Insights, as well as red-teaming, a method used by the tech industry to stress-test how systems might behave under attack. from bad actors. “We are focused on addressing potential issues and are committed to listening and acting quickly,” Budaraju said. Google put it in May additional guardrails in AI Reviews after their unusual responses of restricting the inclusion of satire and humor content and limiting the types of requests that trigger the feature.
In addition to expanding the feature to more countries, Google is making another big change to how AI is viewed: it will now prominently display links to resources on the right side of every AI-generated answer, making it easier for people to click. Go to the actual website where the answer came from. For a small number of users, it will also add direct links to the text of AI Reviews. If this action is implemented more widely, this may subside concerns of publishers about Losing traffic to AI reads the web for people and reduces the need to navigate to actual web pages.
“This experiment has shown positive results early on and we are able to drive more traffic with direct in-text links,” Budaraju said.
Users who log into Search Labs, the company’s platform for testing upcoming features before general release, also come with a few extra features — the ability to “save” a view of a specific AI for future reference, as well as the option to simplify the language of an AI-generated response, from Google something previewed earlier this year.
Update, August 15, 2024, 12:50 PM ET: This story has been updated to clarify that links in the text of AI Insights are available to a small subset of users, not just registered users of Search Labs.
