- “News Summary” appears on the Google TV page for you
- Will recommend related videos of “Top News Stories”
- Only in the US, and is being tested only with some users
Google is experimenting with AI-driven news summaries and recommendations that you will be able to see on your Google TV. It seems like a very bad idea.
The feature, called News Briefs, was discovered by Android Authority on Google’s support pages. It will use “Twin Models and Human Evaluation” to give reported overviews of top news stories and “Related YouTube videos from trusted news sources.”
So far, it is only being tested with selected users and it is only being tested in the United States. And I hope that at the end of the test they kill it with fire.
The problem with AI news is simple
The thing with artificial intelligence is that in the absence of a better description it is a massive error communication machine. To take a fairly innocent example, Apple’s AI headlines have been a disaster and their AI-SUMES on my iPhone are often hilariously funny wrong.
Again and again, we see very clear evidence that AI cannot trust at the moment. Sometimes it’s fun – as Associated Press found in the summer of 2024, Gemini will gladly tell you that astronauts have been playing with cats on the moon – but sometimes it is much more serious; The same report notes that Google’s AI shared the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama is Muslim.
The problem with AI is that what we are told is ai … not. It is like a very powerful auto correction, a prediction machine, and when its data is bad – and it is often – it produces bad information with great confidence. And online there is a whole ecosystem based on making bad information and leading it to social media such as YouTube.
Given YouTube’s results with regard to recommendations – NBC News is one of many organizations that demonstrated a political and religious bias in the content recommended to people, e.g. New sounds scary.
And on top of that, I get lots of nightmarish news delivered to me all day, every day on my phone – maybe if I’ve turned on my TV, it’s to escape, get distracted or entertained. Some people love to watch rolling news (or news -like) networks all day, but some of us use our TV to focus elsewhere.
There is probably bad news in the world right now. I really hope Google TV will not add more of it.
