In August 2023, Google announced an Indian version of its search powered by generative AI. This would offer a chatbot-like experience instead of the whole type-a keyword-and-get-a-thousand-links situation we’re used to. This would be called Search Generative Experience (SGE) and it would allow people to search in both English and Hindi. And not just that, there could, also, be voice outputs with a voice reading out the AI output.
So, what’s up with Google’s tryst with Generative AI? SGE was initially announced in May 2023 at Google’s annual conference Google I/O. If you’re wondering what the “I/O” means, it’s for the 1 and 0 at the start and end of a googol, which is what Google is named after. Google announced a new AI language model called PaLM 2 (Pathways Language Model 2). So, the Big Tech giant has declared that it would embed AI into 25 products, including Gmail and Search. Gmail, for example, in its current state, has an auto-response like “Good to know”, “I can do that”, “Best of luck”, “My condolences” and other short phrases based on the content of an email you receive. According to Google, this is meant to empower them and be a co-pilot.
This is meant to try and transform the way news stories are written and headlines are published. This would provide options for headlines and different writing styles and help journalists focus on reporting, fact-checking and other meaningful work. Or are there way too many websites that provide content that the death of some publishing entities would be negligible? Or can there be an argument that the scraping could fall under the fair use doctrine? On the misinformation front, there may be some good news. There are reports that Google may use its AI to try to fight misinformation by watermarking AI-generated images using Google Images and Google Lens.
