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Google is testing AI-generated headlines in its Discover feed, replacing original news headlines with original ones. Sean Hollister, editor-in-chief of The Verge, reported this , noting that short and often misleading AI-generated headlines had begun appearing in his smartphone feed instead of newspaper headlines.
The experiment involved the Google Discover news feed on Samsung Galaxy and Google Pixel smartphones. Hollister noted that the system attempts to reduce the meaning of a post to a few words, but the results are often skewed. Posts about Baldur’s Gate 3 are receiving headlines accusing players of child exploitation, while articles about the Qi2 standard are mired in accusations of slowing down older Pixels.
An Ars Technica article about Valve’s upcoming console price devolves into a claim that the price has already been revealed, while a catchy headline about graphics card sales at a German retailer is shortened to a sentence about AMD solutions supposedly “outperforming” Nvidia .
It simply pops up with nonsensical phrases, such as vague references to “backups” and “AI labeling controversies,” which, without the context of the news, sound like a jumble of random words.
Journalists emphasize that the problem isn’t just about the quality of wording . Publications are losing control over how their content is presented in the Google feed, and readers may assume that clickbait headlines are created by the editors themselves, since logos and media names still appear next to them.
The lack of transparency is a particular source of frustration: Google flags such listings with a warning indicating the use of artificial intelligence and the possibility of errors, but this warning is only visible by expanding the “More details” section, not directly in the feed.
The company describes the changes as a small interface experiment for some Discover users. According to Google spokesperson Mallory DeLeon, the goal of the changes is to make information on a topic easier to digest before arriving on the site . However, the journalistic community sees this as a continuation of a trend in which the search engine and its related services are increasingly keeping their audience within the Google ecosystem and sending less and less traffic to news sites.
Against this backdrop, editorial teams are seeking new revenue streams, including subscription models, and warn that a further shift in focus toward AI-powered content processing could only accelerate the decline of the internet.
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