Google AI Overviews is Reddit

Sometimes you read a piece that annoys you because you wish you wrote it yourself. “I’m tired of talking to AI” by anonymous developer Orchid is one of those pieces. The short post ends like this:

I’m tired of talking to AI. I want to talk to real people. But even when I talk to people, they forward my questions to AI and send me the AI’s answer.

Every company is shoving AI down our throats now. One of the most prominent examples of this is Google’s AI Overviews, which pops up on damn near every search you do. In the early days, it was pretty bad and easy to make fun of. But annoyingly, it’s now gotten pretty good. Arvind Narayanan from AI as Normal Technology put it well in a post from earlier this year:

I think our disdain for companies “shoving AI down our throats” is largely a selection effect — when one of these AI integrations is new and experimental, we tend to notice, but over time the kinks get worked out, it becomes a part of our workflow, and we stop noticing it. Reminds me of the classic quip that “AI is whatever doesn’t work yet.”

But Google AI Overviews is also Reddit.

Reddit has annoyed me for literally decades now, which is why I never made an account despite for years appending “reddit” to the end of my Google searches when I wanted to get a usable answer to certain types of questions. It annoys me because I was participating in Internet forums since long before I was old enough to legally do so. Reddit centralized discussion on the Internet and replaced all the old forums, homogenizing their unique cultures into a single grey blob.

And yet I read it anyway, because of course it was super useful to have one place where you could find a community on literally any subject you wanted to know more about. Inevitably there would be a bunch of weirdos arguing about exactly the question you had. It was either that or sifting through SEO garbage on Google.

Reddit is one of the most cited sources in AI Overviews and no doubt makes up a sizable fraction of the corpus used to train the underlying model. So the thing that replaced the forums is now being summarized by the thing that is replacing search.

Now the centralized, grey blob is Google AI Overviews.

This is the part that makes Orchid’s post sting. I want to talk to real people too. But the real people were on forums, and then the real people were on Reddit, and now the real people are summarized in the linguistic equivalent of Corporate Memphis.

Reddit ate the forums. Google AI Overviews is eating Reddit. And now Google AI Overviews are cannibalizing traffic to the rest of the Internet too.

And Google AI Overviews is Reddit.