In a development that will surprise exactly no one familiar with the European Union’s fondness for holding Big Tech’s feet to the regulatory fire, Google has decided to push back its launch of AI Overviews across Europe, citing the kind of cautious deliberation usually reserved for defusing bombs or choosing a Netflix show with your partner.
The feature, which began its slow march onto American search pages in May, provides users with answers directly generated by artificial intelligence right at the top of their search results, effectively giving the web’s equivalent of the loudest person at the party even more floor time. Google has framed this as a way to help users “get information faster” although critics might argue it is also a surprisingly efficient method of making publishers wring their hands in existential dread.
The European Union, brandishing its newly minted Digital Markets Act like a freshly sharpened broadsword, has been taking a hard look at how Google’s AI can affect everything from competition to misinformation to the ever-precarious state of your aunt’s ability to tell real news from something cooked up by a bored language model. In response, rather than risk triggering a continental multi-agency investigation involving more acronyms than a Scrabble championship, Google has decided to take a little more time to dot its i’s and train its bots not to spout culinary advice that could result in chemical burns.
The company quite diplomatically confirmed that it is in “discussions with regulators” and plans to roll out AI Overviews in Europe only after ensuring full compliance with local rulebooks, each of which appears to be written by someone who once got into a fight with an algorithm and never really got over it. Until then, European users must continue enduring the decidedly non-AI-generated novelty of clicking on actual links to learn things.
Europeans may not get AI Overviews just yet but on the bright side they also won’t be told to eat glue by a chatbot trying its best.