Tag Archives: Audience

AI-Generated Summaries Lead to “Devastating” Audience Decline, Reports Online News Media

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Media organizations have been alerted to the potential “devastating impacts” on their digital audiences as AI-generated summaries start to replace traditional search results.

The integration of Google’s AI summarization is causing major concern among media proprietors, as it utilizes blocks of text to condense search results. Some perceive this as a fundamental threat to organizations that rely on search traffic.

AI summaries can offer all the information users seek without necessitating a click on the original source, while links to traditional search results are relegated further down the page, thereby decreasing user traffic.

An analysis by the Authoritas Analytics Company indicates that websites previously ranked at the top of search results may experience around a 79% decrease in traffic for specific queries when results are presented through AI summaries.

The study also highlighted that links to YouTube, owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, are more prominent than traditional search results. This investigation is part of a legal challenge against the UK’s competition regulator concerning the implications of Google’s AI summarization.

In a statement, a Google representative described the study as being “based on inaccurate and flawed assumptions and analysis,” citing a set of searches that does not accurately reflect all queries and results in outdated estimates regarding news website traffic.

“Users are attracted to AI-driven experiences, and AI features in search enable them to pose more questions, creating new avenues for discovering websites,” the spokesperson stated. “We consistently direct billions of clicks to our websites daily and do not observe a significant decline in overall web traffic, as suggested.”

A secondary survey revealed a substantial decline in referral traffic stemming from Google’s AI overview. A month-long study conducted by the US Think tank Pew Research Center found that users clicked on a link under the AI summary only once for every 100 searches.

A Google spokesperson noted that this study employed “a distorted query set that illustrates flawed methodologies and search traffic.”

Senior executives in news organizations claim that Google has consistently declined to share the necessary data to assess the impact of AI summaries.

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Although the AI overview represents only a portion of Google search, UK publishers report feeling its effects already. MailOnline executive Carly Stephen noted a significant decline in clicks from search results featuring AI summaries in May, with click-through rates falling by 56.1% on desktop and 48.2% on mobile devices.

Legal actions against the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority involve partnerships with the technology justice organization FoxGlove, the Independent Publishers Alliance, and advocates for the Open Web movement.

Owen Meredith, the CEO of the News Media Association, accused Google of “keeping users within their own enclosed spaces and trying to monetize them by incorporating valuable content, including news produced through significant efforts of others.”

“The current circumstances are entirely unsustainable, and eventually, quality information will be eliminated online,” he stated. “The Competition and Markets Authority possesses tools to address these challenges, and action must be taken swiftly.”

Rosa Curling, Director of FoxGlove, remarked that the new research highlights “the devastating effects the Google ‘AI Overview’ has already inflicted on the UK’s independent news sector.”

“If Google merely takes on the job of journalists and presents it as its own, that would be concerning enough,” she expressed. “But what’s worse is that they use this work to promote their own tools and advantages while making it increasingly difficult for the media to connect with the readers vital for their survival.”

Source: www.theguardian.com

Chimpanzees Perform Better at Difficult Tasks with an Audience present.

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Chimpanzee taking a number test on a touch screen

Akiho Muramatsu

Audience pressure can affect human performance both positively and negatively, and it turns out the same is true for our closest relatives.

Kristen Lin He and his colleagues at Kyoto University in Japan tested groups of six chimpanzees kept at the university's Primate Research Institute on three numerical tasks of varying difficulty.

In the first task, numbers from 1 to 5 appeared in random positions on the screen, and the chimpanzees simply had to touch the numbers in the correct order to receive a reward.

In the second task, the numbers were not adjacent. For example, 1, 3, 5, 7, 11, 15 might appear on the screen. Again, the chimpanzees had to press a number from the minimum value to the maximum value to receive a reward.

Finally, in the most difficult test, when the first digit in the sequence was pressed, the remaining digits were hidden behind a checkered square on the screen. This meant that the chimps had to memorize the positions of the numbers in order to press them in the correct order.

The chimpanzees were tested on this task thousands of times over six years with a variety of audiences, including one to eight human observers, people familiar with chimpanzees, and people new to chimpanzees.

When the task was easy, the chimpanzees performed worse as more people watched. However, on the most difficult task, all six chimpanzees performed better as the audience size increased.

“It was very surprising that performance improved so much as the number of human experimenters increased, because having more humans present can be distracting,” Lin says. “However, the results suggest that this may actually motivate them to perform even better.

“For the easiest tasks, humans may distract them, but for the most difficult tasks, humans can become a stressor and actually motivate them to perform better.”

team members Shinya YamamotoResearchers from Kyoto University also said they were surprised to find this effect in chimpanzees.

“Such audience effects are thought to be unique to humans who live in reputation-based and normative societies, where it is possible to perform well in front of an audience, and others to perform well in front of an audience. Sometimes they perform worse than they do,” he says. “However, our study shows that this audience effect may have evolved in the ape lineage before this type of normative society developed.”

Yamamoto says it's difficult and sometimes dangerous to tease out direct human implications from non-human research. “However, by telling people that chimpanzees are the same way, it may be possible to subtly calm the nerves of people who are extremely nervous in front of others.”

Miguel Llorente A team of researchers from the University of Girona in Spain suggests that it may be possible to further study how audience effects relate to individual chimpanzee personalities.

“To generalize these results to natural chimpanzee behavior, we will investigate these effects with chimpanzee audiences to more fully understand how these dynamics play out in natural social contexts.” “It would also be interesting to understand that,” he says.

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Source: www.newscientist.com