Vanity Fair [unpaywalled] – “Summarization tools from OpenAI and Google offer a CliffsNotes version of journalism that may further dumb down public discourse and deliver a brutal blow to an already battered media business…we’re on the cusp of a similar phenomenon with the new wave of AI summarization tools being launched by OpenAI, Google, and Facebook. These tools, though impressive in their ability to distill information, are just a few steps away from creating an “Irtnog”-like reality, where the richness of human knowledge and depth of understanding are reduced to bite-size, and sometimes dangerously inaccurate, summaries for our little brains to consume on our tiny devices. Case in point, this month Google launched several new AI-powered features for its search engine. One of the most notable additions is the AI Overviews feature, which provides AI-generated summaries at the top of search results. Essentially, that’s a fancy way of saying AI will summarize search results for you, because apparently reading anything that is not a summary is just too much effort these days. For news publishers, this is—understandably!—quite worrisome. Over the past three decades, tech companies have systematically helped siphon off the advertising revenue that once supported robust journalism, as advertisers have flocked to the targeted offerings of social media and search platforms. At the same time, the proliferation of free news content aggregated by tech giants (ahem, Google News) has made it increasingly difficult for news outlets to attract and retain paying subscribers. As such, the publishing industry has been declining since the early 2000s, when the real tech companies were separated from the chaff of the dot-com bubble, with newspaper revenues falling by more than 50% over the past two decades…”