Despite the ease with which generative AI serves up content that would otherwise take humans hours to complete, a major concern remains: plagiarized text. This is particularly true with Google’s ChatGPT rival,Bard, for which the search giant was recently slapped with a class-action lawsuit for allegedly stealing vast amounts of data from the web to train the AI tool.
The company’sAI-powered Search Generative Experience (SGE)is equally guilty, and asTom’s Hardware’s Avram Piltchnoted in a lengthy post, SGE is essentially “an AI plagiarism engine that grabs facts and snippets of text from a variety of sites.” That’s because the earlier version of SGE ignored the sources of information it scraped from the web, but the company seems to be testing a way to display prominent in-line source links.
As spotted by9to5Google, the search giant has made SGE more transparent by showing the names of publications or websites where information included in its AI-generated responses was sourced. This wasn’t previously the case, with the AI-powered search experience only displaying plain text as if it were created entirely by Google’s AI technology.
In a test search made by the folks at 9to5, Google responded with an entire draft interspersed with multiple links to various sources (this site included). In addition, several cards appeared on the right side, previewing the articles from the same sources mentioned in the SGE. However, 9to5 noted that the in-line sources do not appear for all queries.
The new feature does not appear to be widely available at the moment, though it could be rolling out as part oftoday’s big update to Bard. If it becomes Bard’s default behavior, it would be a promising improvement in the credibility of information appearing in AI-based search results. This also helps to properly cite the original sources, which is important to prevent plagiarism.
Google’s new source links for SGE are a big step in the right direction. They make it easier to trust the information Google provides while also helping to keep the original sources afloat.
