> My issue with AI summaries is that they are not even remotely accurate, trustworthy or deterministic.
I am firmly on the "AI" skeptic side of this discussion. And yet if there's anything this technology is actually useful for is for summarizing content and extracting key points from it. Search engines contain massive amounts of data. Training a statistical model on it that can provide instant results to arbitrary queries is a far more efficient method of making the data useful for users than showing them a sorted list of results which may or may not be useful.
Yes, it might not be 100% accurate, but based on my own experience, it is reliable for the vast majority of use cases. Certainly beats hunting for what I need in an arbitrarily ordered list and visiting hostile web sites.
> LLMs are sycophantic and agree with you all the time, even if it means making shit up.
Those are issues that plague conversational UIs, and long context windows. "AI" summaries answer a single query and the context is volatile.
> And what happens when people stop creating new websites because they aren't getting any visitors (and by extension ad-revenue)? New info will stop being disseminated.
That's baseless fearmongering and speculation. Websites might be impacted by this feature, but they will cope, and we'll find ways to avoid the doomsday scenario you're envisioning.
Some search engines like Kagi already provide references under their "AI" summaries. If Google is pressured to do so, they will likely do the same as well.
So the web will survive this specific feature. Website authors should be more preoccupied with providing better content than with search engines stealing their traffic. I do think that "AI" is a net negative for the world in general, but that's a separate discussion.
