Widespread AI search is only a couple of months old at this point, but it’s already attracted plenty of criticism. From bad medical advice to worse cooking advice (gasoline WILL spice up your spaghetti, after all), the AI summaries that Google and other search engines now place above traditional search results are yielding some funny-because-they’re-serious moments for people looking for information online.
Most of us won’t follow an AI’s advice to eat rocks or glue cheese to a pizza, but AI search — at least as it’s configured now — poses a significant danger to the websites of political campaigns, nonprofits and advocacy organizations. As I write in my most recent Campaigns & Elections column, political websites often depend on search engines for the bulk of their traffic, but AI summaries may give away the site’s information without sending visitors in return:
But what happens if those visitors stop coming? At the moment, AI search platforms often summarize information from a website without linking back to it. Traditional search results do generally appear below the AI summary on the page, but we don’t know yet how many users will bother to scroll down. Or how long those results will remain below the AI output, since Google’s been degrading traditional search for years and could get rid of the links any time it wanted.
Besides traffic starvation, AI search summaries also risk distorting the language campaigns and advocates often choose carefully:
But wait, there’s always more. As DSPolitical’s Mark Jablonowski pointed out on a recent call, AI has no ear for political nuance. When an AI tries to answer a question about where a candidate stands on an issue, it may draw from the campaign website and even link to it. But its “summary” could easily mangle the subtleties of someone’s position, or add “facts” that simply sound like they ought to be there. An AI chatbot is essentially a statistics engine drawing on the accumulated content of internet, not something that “understands” political messaging. It’s autocorrect on steroids, and we all know how “ducking” well autocorrect can work.
Read the full C&E piece for more!
– cpd