AI search answers are the fast food of your information diet convenient and tasty, but no substitute for good nutrition [Video]

If you have used Google lately and been lucky – or unlucky – enough to encounter an answer to your query rather than a bunch of links, you have been subjected to something called AI Overviews. This is a new core feature that Google has been rolling out, a move widely anticipated since the company’s experiments with its LaMDA large language model in 2021, and since OpenAI’s ChatGPT artificial intelligence chatbot rocketed to prominence in 2023.

This feature is yet another addition to the increasing number of add-ons and tools being integrated into search engines like Google. Some of the notable examples include knowledge graph-driven knowledge panels, which are used to populate relevant factual information in an infobox next to search results, and featured snippets…