Not sure who is doing this exactly, if it’s DDG or Reddit or someone else. I was looking for a comparison of epic vs steam and noticed that the description of the search result is AI-generated, instead of actually showing anything from the thread.
A user asks why they should buy games on Steam rather than Epic, and gets various answers from other users. Some of the reasons include Steam’s features, performance, community, and exclusivity.
The problem I see is that it introduces another degree of separation between the user and the wider Internet. Instead of indexing sites, browsers are trying to interpret them for us. The extreme edge case of this is not having websites at all anymore, just apps and an omniscient AI that answers anything. Cool in theory, but in practice these omniscient beings really aren’t and instead are very fallible. Presumably these tools are also owned by corporations with shareholder values that are often contrary to user values. I can only speak for myself, but I experience these summaries as a loss of control over how I interact with the Internet and a step down a path I would rather not tread.
In this example the AI also does not provide anything valuable. It only defines a forum thread in terms of the question asked.
The very last sentence of its summary provides extremely useful context that may make you want to click through to find more in-depth answers. I have no idea what you’re talking about.
Only if you have very limited experience searching for information. Those kinds of details should be a given. That’s my concern, that people who do not know what information is useful come to rely on these summaries and forfeit their own agency, rather than develop critical reading and decision making skills