Google is once again playing the role of editor-in-chief, directly intervening on the original headlines of magazine articles that appear on its search results pages. The titling, it seems, is handled by its Artificial Intelligence algorithms, apparently with the aim of improving them to increase the chances of clicks.
GOOGLE’S AI CROSSES THE LINE WITH THE VERGE
The issue emerged following an article from The Verge which directly testifies that its pieces were taken by Google but appeared on the results screen with completely different headlines than those chosen by the newspaper. “In recent months, several members of the editorial staff have seen headlines they never wrote appear on Google: headlines that do not follow our editorial style and without any indication that Google replaced the words we had chosen,” it reads.
The innovative publication reports this example: the headline “I used the ‘cheat on everything’ AI tool and it didn’t help me cheat on anything” was replaced, on the search results page, by a much more blunt one, namely “‘Cheat on everything’ AI tool.”
For those less fluent in English, it went from the original (“I used the ‘cheat on everything’ AI tool and it didn’t help me cheat on anything”) which already expressed a judgment hinting at a negative experience of the reviewer, to a sparse and at times grammatically incorrect (at least according to journalistic grammar) “‘Cheat on everything’ AI tool” that conveys nothing to the reader and certainly does not encourage clicking to learn more.
WHO PAYS FOR THE DETERIORATION?
By doing so, Google exposes itself to possible compensation claims from the publications whose headlines are mutilated, especially if this happens outside of a prior agreement and without journalistic oversight afterward. The headlines, left to the cut-and-paste of its AI, risk not only reducing clicks from potentially interested readers (with consequent economic damage for publishers, since business models rely on on-page advertising) but also causing the publication and the author involved in the experiment to lose credibility.
The Verge understandably did not take it well at all: “This is like a bookstore that tears the covers off the books it displays and changes their titles. We spend a lot of time trying to write true, interesting, fun, and worthy headlines that deserve the reader’s attention without resorting to clickbait, but Google seems to believe we do not have the intrinsic right to market our work that way.”
Yet another proof of the increasingly difficult coexistence between Google and web newspapers but also, and above all, yet another proof that journalistic work cannot be replaced by Artificial Intelligence which, lacking experience, irony, and critical sense, certainly will not be able to title with wit.
