Google は最近、AI によるサービスの質の低下に本格的に取り組んでいる

KETTLE Google I/O has ostensibly been an AI show for a few years running, but this year's announcements have taken the cake, which Google seems all to happy to let its users eat as it reshapes the web. On this week's episode of The Kettle, host Brandon Vigliarolo is joined by El Reg senior reporter Tom Claburn and open source reporter Liam Proven to discuss how Google's bevy of AI announcements, and declaration that we're entering the era of AI search, might not play well with customers. From an enlarged AI mode, to AI ads stuffed into AI answers, and pushing AI devs onto closed-source tools after shuttering open-source ones, Google is leaning hard into its version of the future of the internet no matter what users might think, and we wonder whether that might finally crack Google's stranglehold on the web. You can listen to The Kettle here, as well as on Spotify and Apple Music, or read the transcript of the latest episode below. It's been lightly edited for clarity. Brandon (00:04) Welcome back to another episode of The Register's Kettle Podcast. I'm your host Brandon Vigliarolo, and you've likely heard about this week's topic if you've paid any attention to the internet in the past week. Google said at its annual I/O event that it's reinventing search for the AI era. But from an outsider perspective, it seems a lot more like Google's leaning into AI as an excuse to reshape the web and Gemini's image, regardless of how that might affect access to the open web. Unpredictably, there are a lot of people calling foul over that and other recent AI moves made by Google. With me to discuss this is El Reg Senior Reporter Tom Claburn. And joining us for the first time on this iteration of the kettle is our open source guru Liam Proven. Thanks to both of you for being here. Thomas Claburn (00:45) Thanks. Liam Proven (00:46) Thank you. Brandon (00:46) So hey, Google's AI-ification of search was the big news to come out of I/O this week. Tom, you tuned into the keynote and wrote about this. So what exactly did Google say it's going to do and why is everyone so up in arms over this? Thomas Claburn (01:01) I mean, it's just more encroachment of AI into search and they, you know, they have their AI Overviews, which are the little summaries that they put up on top of search results. And then they also have separate thing that's very similarly named, but different called AI Mode, which is available through a tab and you click on it that's sort of a deeper version of AI, I think it ties into some, Google knowledge graph and it has sort of a broader thing, but you often get similar results, but basically they're going to be showing more of the AI Overviews and, it's not always clear when these happen, but basically for longer queries, it's more likely to be handed off to an AI model. Brandon (01:44) Mm-hmm. Thomas Claburn (01:45) And it's a problem for a lot of people because people's relationship with Google began with: you go to Google, you find stuff, and then you leave. And increasingly, it's you go to Google and you're stuck there like it's a tar pit. And you're just trying to figure out where did they get this information? And they'll put up a summary. And of course, they have the disclaimer, well, you know, maybe it's not accurate. You'll have to check on that. How are you going to check on it? I'll go to the links that we didn't show you. It's, you know, people I think are a little bit – I mean, part of it is just people don't like change, but part of it is just AI really is not the right answer for a lot of things, at least in my opinion. I think there are certain kinds of queries that it can be useful for. And I think that largely though, if people are going to look for documents, they need to be able to find reputable sites and be able to make trust decisions. And a lot of that information is getting obscured or put into little teeny citation chips that you have to click on to figure out, where is this information coming from? Brandon (02:49) Yeah, and sometimes when you click on one site, it'll give you four or five links and be like, well, here's the sources we use to compile this information. Like a lot of times, I'll admit, I do use the AI Overviews every once in a while when they pop up, especially for simple questions like on my smartphone or something. But they'll give you, cite their sources and you click on them. But sometimes that's just as big a pain in the butt as assuming that the AI Overview is just correct. I'd much rather just have a list of blue links, which Google did clarify to me and to Avram, our US editor, earlier this week, that traditional search engine result pages are not going away. Thomas Claburn (03:24) Yeah, they're not going away. They're just going to get buried under more AI. You have to work harder to find them. And then there was some other interesting stuff too, where their Gemini Spark, which is their agent... in the Gemini app, they're also going to be pushing these long-running AI tasks that you'll be able to do, and they're eventually going hook it up to the regular Google account or search or whatever. So you can basically run a chron job with, you know, an AI model essentially, to go do things for you. And I think that the think they talk about it for is shopping. It's gonna, of course, plan your travel itinerary and do stuff for you in the background, and somehow you're gonna be happy with results. It's not clear how you're gonna pay for that because someone has to run this stuff, maybe this all comes out of the hide of advertisers who are gonna sort of get shoveled into these results, who knows? Brandon (04:20) Right, and that's actually kind of segues really well into one of the stories that I wrote about I/O this week, and that was Google's new AI advertisements that they're kind of injecting in. They... I see we're doing audio, but I see Liam on the other side of the camera just putting his hand in his hands, you know, my God. We talk about where the cash is going to come from from this, and it's obviously going to come from this, right? There were two particular kinds of AI advertisements that Google said they were going to add soon to AI mode. There were some ads that were going to be basically in line. If you ask a query, you get your responses back from the AI. In that list of results is going to be ads. And Google said they're going to be at the bottom of the list, but they're still going to be presented in line. And I think there might be some indicator about them being a sponsored element of the post, but they're still putting them in line with results that are ostensibly grabbed from the web and are supposed to be factual. The other one that I found a little more concerning personally was conversational discovery ads. So basically the way Google described this is, you ask a complicated question and it will use Gemini to figure out what products you need to solve your problems. And the example they gave was, oh well, your house smells kind of musty and you want to make it smell more like a spa. Well, I feel like if I were to go onto Google right now and type in, my house smells musty and I don't want it to. Some of the first things you might get are things like, put some baking soda in some water, make a 50-50 mixture of vinegar and water, and you can deodorize and clean for pennies on the dollar. But Google sees this as a way to inject products in front of you.... I was picturing going in there and asking for tips on cleaning my house and deodorizing it and getting a whole bunch of ads for $20 reed diffusers, expensive plug-in units. Liam Proven (05:55) Mm-hmm. Brandon (06:08) That's how I see this, right? And I don't know if that's entirely correct, but Google's not doing a lot to kind of say that that's not the case. Liam Proven (06:17) I feel like the great prophet Cory Doctorow kind of nailed this a couple of years ago now with this word, enshittification. I was baffled when Google announced that it was going to start deliberately degrading search results in the interest of keeping people on the page and on the site longer. And it feels like they're not leaning in, they dived off the board and jumping in, pinch the nose and throw yourself in. I do not see how this is going to pay long term, but, on the one hand maybe there's some genius there with playing playing four-dimensional chess, maybe they're just... they've drunk the Kool-Aid and cannot imagine anything else now Brandon (07:05) Yeah, it just feels like an attempt. I mean, it was the same thing with Google saying that they were introducing, I think, some commerce protocols earlier this year that were designed to basically allow Gemini to check out for you. So you don't even need to go to a company's website to buy a product now. You can do it all right through Gemini. So that, again, that's starving a company of web views so that Google can make a few more cents on a transaction. Thomas Claburn (07:28) Yeah. Brandon (07:29) And I don't see how this is any different, right? It's injecting more ads, getting more things in front of you, and burying actual web results below this in the hopes that you never get to that point. Thomas Claburn (07:36) And the one thing it's going to incentivize is that everyone who actually wants to use an AI model is going to think, how can I use this to block ads? How can I use it to get this stuff out of my Google search results and get something that's closer to whatever, some kind of neutral or less commercial standard? At least if you put up with it, if you don't just turn it off entirely and think, I'm going to figure out – I'm going to go back to Yahoo and get a list of curated sites and just stay there. Brandon (08:06) I think about it sometimes in terms of, you know, well, Google Search was never giving me an objective view of what's on the internet, right? It's always filtered through Google's algorithm or whoever's. But I feel like there's a difference between filtering it through an algorithm and making me do the legwork and just assuming that whatever Gemini is serving to me is going to be exactly what I need because Google thinks that's what I need. Liam Proven (08:31) Maybe you take a, what's the expression, a 30,000 foot view, but I think we've got to go a lot higher and take a low earth orbit view. This is going to be very good news for the wider software community as it drives improvements in ad blocking technology, Google-free browsers, Google-free search engines, Google-free anything, please, anything that can get this stuff out of our face. Thomas Claburn (08:56) Europe is already partway there with the sort digital sovereignty stuff. I mean, this is just another sort of data point in the rationale for moving. perhaps we'll finally see some innovation where Google kills its own search business. And it's not like search was doing so well anyway. Even before the AI boom, was a lot of complaints that there were just lacks about policing, spam farms and things like that. There was a lot of lifting you had to do even just as a 10 blue links user to sort through the junk. And if they really cared about delivering quality editorial to people, the web would look a lot different. Brandon (09:35) You just wrote an op-ed, Tom, that kind of covers some of that, right? You asked Google's own AIs why Google search results were getting worse, and it pretty much was like, yeah, hey, they are. Mea culpa here, you know, it was... Thomas Claburn (09:39) Right. It's unfair, but it's also, kind of telling that this is what we've come to where, we're going to source stuff off of a couple of Reddit opinions and blogs. And then, when you ask it, when you frame it in a nice way, "why is Google search great?" It goes to Google's own blog posts to source that. I guess that works for some people, but it's really just a poisonous media ecosystem. I who wants to even be a part of that? I mean, I think all of this just drives a lot of sane people away. And the only people who are left are gonna be sort of hucksters and grifters and people who are trying to game the system for whatever commercial intent they have. Liam Proven (10:27) It is. Yeah, it's going to. think one possible effect will be driving the creation, the fragmentation of the Internet, maybe not exactly layering, which is what I thought might be happening a decade or so ago. But in the same way that there are sites like Conservapedia and so on that try to present a U.S. right wing Moral Majority type view of Wikipedia, that there will be a fragmentation into the AI-driven web and the little indie, we're trying to keep this out, AI-free web. There already was this attempt the other Gemini, Gemini the protocol, it was launched about a decade or so ago now. Brandon (11:19) Yeah, really quick, remind us what that is? Liam Proven (11:22) It's an extremely lightweight protocol and markup language for serving pages of hyperlinked content, that's not the web. And you needed to run a Gemini server and you needed to use a Gemini browser to access it. And it gave you kind of like a markdown view of the web. So you got, bold, italic, and underline and nothing else ... you have no color, you have no fonts, you have no images and really, really stripping back the online hypertext experience to like an early nineties view. It's kind of faltered in recent years, but it's people choosing this very minimalist and stripped-back experience and much as it seems, I think, to baffle marketing executives, I think a lot of people would choose an un-augmented AI-free view of the web these days. Brandon (12:18) I mean, just think about, good Lord, the videos coming out of college graduations recently, right? know, everyone, I think Liam, you mentioned earlier, everyone except Woz has been booed to hell and back in the past couple of weeks for making AI claims. I think there's a lot of dissatisfaction with it, right? I think you're right. I think there'll be a lot of people. Thomas Claburn (12:36) The irony is that this should be the moment to shine for the social media networks that are notionally about people and connections, which haven't been with Meta and Facebook. I mean, it's turning into the same AI slop engine as everything else and is driving people away. There's theoretically room for some kind of network that humans can interact with because it's just not pleasant to be with bots. I mean, nobody wants to get AI communication. No one wants to deal with it. And you just cannot operate in the same space as a bot. They operate on a velocity that people can't deal with. And it's just frustrating. So I don't know how people are going to want to participate in this. Liam Proven (13:14) I've gone through a little unexpected voyage in recent months because oddly enough, as a professional writer, and I also read a very great deal and have since childhood, I kept reading people saying, "this text is AI generated. I'm not going on any further because I read the first couple of lines and I just knew. It's full of AI tells." And so I started asking people, you know, what are the tells? What are the signs? Oh it's, it's, it's just obvious. It's redolent. Okay. But can you give me a clue here? You know, what, what are the things that give it away for you? And I have not yet been able to get anybody when pressed to give me a nice clear list. You know, a lot of it boils down to em-dashes and I've been using them for years, but Brandon (14:04) I wasgonna say I love the dash, so it really kind of throws a wrench in my work. Proven (14:06) Right? You know, I learned there are a handful of actual fairly concrete things, you know, the "not only, but also" kind of structure that the bots do overuse. But I'm seeing people going, "I'm not going to read that because it's obviously bot-generated." And then somebody else pops up and goes, "Hi, I wrote that. That's my site. I don't use any bots. That was all just me." One guy recently I was reading said, "Look, I've got the git history with the 19 commits, because it's not a very long site, you know, as I wrote it. Would you like me to show you the process by which I wrote every word?" And of course the guy challenged goes, "Well, I don't know. I'm not sure I believe you." And he's like, "Okay. So you've gone from a certainty to doubt. I guess I'll take that." But I watched with interest the relaunch of the Digg social network over the last year or so. And Digg was very much like Reddit about 15 years ago, coming up to 20 years ago, it was a site with lots of special interest groups where you posted interesting stuff, but was driven by threaded conversation. Brandon (15:12) Yeah, I remember Digg. It was great. When it went under I just moved to Reddit. Liam Proven (15:20) And, and, the guy, I think it's Kevin Rose that owned it, got it back and relaunched it very much in the old model, but without the ability to create your own groups and stuff. So he was trying to keep it a bit smaller. And I joined, because I had a Digg account in the day and thought, this is strangely bland and anodyne. You know, it's full of people being nice to each other and saying nice things. And it seems to be largely content-free. Well, it shut down again earlier this year. And he said, "We got infiltrated by bots. We got loads and loads of people posting bot-generated content until a lot of the discussions were bots talking to other bots." That would kind of explain what I saw, you know, but I'm still on Twitter, call it Twitter. I'm still on Twitter and I have a block list, which is like six pages long now of words and phrases. And it makes it kind of tolerable, but it is very odd to watch the interchange and they've changed it recently so that you can block accounts, block and mute accounts which are serving ads and yeah, if those are paying, paying advertisers, they ignore your blocks. You get them anyway. ⁓ all right. Yeah. Brandon (16:30) Yeah, of course. I have the same thing on Reddit, right? I've blocked multiple advertisers and I go in to see, well, why am I seeing this? I want to block this account again. It's like, no, you already got this account blocked. And it's like, well, then why am I seeing your ad? Liam Proven (16:39) Yeah, yeah. And yet, you know, it's still actually quite lively and there's a lot of discussion and there are still interesting people and some of the interesting people I followed years ago still are still posting and the discussions are still good. Some people are choosing this experience and it's not just because they're paying for it. Some people will choose this experience for reasons that escape me. Thomas Claburn (17:01) People build up, you know, it's the follower structure. You build up an audience and it's costly to rebuild that. So a lot of people have stuck with X and there are now political reasons to stay with X and a lot of people have done that. And even journalists – I mean, I would have loved to given up my X account, but it's useful because there are still people who post interesting things. Brandon (17:28) Yeah, I don't really post on there anymore, but I still have my account. Thomas Claburn (17:30) Yeah, it's worth it for sort of source finding. People, I think that they flee the AI influence when they see it. If they don't leave the site, they figure out a way to filter it. So I think it's going to be a very difficult few years as some kind of new equilibrium emerges because the old sort of systems where people and bots mix is just not satisfying to people. Liam Proven (17:54) And as X declines, I'm watching Mastodon, the Fediverse grow and get more interesting and get more feedback and interesting discussions. I still find Lemmy kind of a pain to deal with. I don't really like the presentation, which is like the activity pub-driven version of Reddit, kind of, but I'm getting lots of interesting comments and feedback and, I don't like this word, but engagement. People are engaging on