Confidently Asserted

In the old days, a google search never promised to give you The Answer. That wasn't what it was for. A search might lead you to some information which could help answer your question, but we all understood that it was caveat emptor. It was a search engine, not a definitive answer provider.

The AI "answers" pretend to be that.

Google’s AI Overviews are peddling misinformation on a scale that may be virtually unprecedented in human history.

A recent analysis conducted by the AI startup Oumi at the behest of The New York Times found that the AI-generated summaries, which appear above Google search results, are accurate around 91 percent of the time.

In a sense, that may sound like an impressive figure. But here’s an even more impressive one: five trillion. That’s roughly the number of search queries that Google processes every year, translating to tens of millions of wrong answers that the AI Overviews are providing every hour — and hundreds of thousands every minute, the analysis calculated.

The issue isn't just google, of course. The misinformation peddlers are being emedded into everything, and as they are eating each other's output, they are likely to get worse, not better.