Did you know that BG3 players exploit children? Or that Qi2 slows older Pixels? If these sensational headlines were published, they would face significant backlash. Yet, Google is experimenting with something similar by replacing original headlines on news stories with AI-generated versions that often miss the mark.

I often catch up on news using Google Discover, accessible by swiping right on a Samsung Galaxy or Google Pixel home screen. It’s here that these AI-generated headlines are starting to appear.

Not all of these AI-crafted headlines are problematic. For instance, titles like “Origami model wins prize” and “Hyundai, Kia gain share” seem adequate, though they lack the intrigue of the original titles. The original headlines, such as “Hyundai and Kia are lapping the competition as US market share reaches a new record” and “14-year-old wins prize for origami that can hold 10,000 times its own weight,” are far more compelling.

However, in its effort to condense stories into just a few words, Google’s new headline initiative often results in misleading and trivial summaries attached to journalists’ work, with little transparency about the AI’s role in rewriting them.

The first AI-generated headline I noticed was “Steam Machine price revealed,” which was misleading since Valve hadn’t disclosed that information yet. The original headline from Ars Technica was more accurate: “Valve’s Steam Machine looks like a console, but don’t expect it to be priced like one.”

Another example is “Microsoft developers using AI,” which oversimplifies the story. This headline was attached to my colleague Tom Warren’s article titled “How Microsoft’s developers are using AI.” By omitting just a couple of words, Google turned a meaningful headline into one that lacks substance.

I also saw Google try to claim that “AMD GPU tops Nvidia,” as if AMD had announced a new groundbreaking graphics card, when the actual Wccftech story is about how a single German retailer managed to sell more AMD units than Nvidia units within a single week’s span. Wccftech’s headline was relatively responsible, but Google turned it into clickbait.

Then there are the headlines that simply don’t make sense out of context, something real human editors avoid like plague. What does “Schedule 1 farming backup” mean? How about “AI tag debate heats”?

Make no mistake, the problem isn’t just that these AI headlines are bad. It’s that Google is taking away our agency to market our own work, like if we’d written a book and the bookstore decided to replace its cover.

We try hard to craft headlines that invite readers in, ones that responsibly encapsulate the news, ones that help you understand why a story matters right away and get you excited when it’s justified. (Does my headline for this story seem the right amount of excited?) And yet Google seems to think it can just replace these headlines, in a way that might confuse our readers and think we’re the ones generating clickbait, since our publications’ names appear right next to them.

Google does disclose that something about these news items is “Generated with AI, which can make mistakes,” but not what, and readers only see that message if they tap the “See more” button:

It’s too easy for readers to think we intentionally send our stories to Google Discover with these headlines.

The good news is, this is a Google experiment. If there’s enough backlash, the company probably won’t proceed. “These screenshots show a small UI experiment for a subset of Discover users,” Google spokesperson Mallory Deleon tells The Verge. “We are testing a new design that changes the placement of existing headlines to make topic details easier to digest before they explore links from across the web.”

But the overall trend at Google has been to prioritize its own products at the expense of sending clicks to news websites. While the company swears it isn’t destroying the web with AI search, you’d be hard-pressed to find a news outlet that agrees, and even Google has admitted in court that “the open web is already in rapid decline.”

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