GoogleComing soonChromeLaunching a new feature, which will be an in-browser AI writing assistant.
"Writing online can be daunting, especially if you want to express your thoughts in a public setting or forum," Parisa Tabriz, Google's vice president of Chrome, wrote in a post on Tuesday. "So in next month's Chrome release, we're rolling out another experimental AI feature to help you write more confidently online, whether you want to leave a glowing review for a restaurant, craft a friendly response for a party, or write a formal inquiry about an apartment rental." To activate the AI writing assistant, all you have to do is "right-click on a text box or field on any website you visit in Chrome and select 'Help me write,'" Tabriz said.
“Type in a few words and our AI will start the writing process for you,” she said.
Writing as a Lost Art Form AI writing assistants seem pretty innocuous, since there are already a lot of people using AI, like OpenAI's ChatGPT, to generate text. But Chrome's massive user base, combined with easy access to AI writing assistants, could have a worldwide impact on the internet.
What does it mean when everyone uses AI to generate content? At scale, the results could be dire.
People can unintentionally plagiarize content because these AI platforms “cannot learn without tending to inadvertently repeat large amounts of text and images from the source,” AI expert and cognitive scientist Gary Marcus wrote on his Substack.
You can also see this tendency toward copyright infringement in generative AI applications.
And a huge danger of Google's massive release of its AI writing assistant is that the internet will be flooded with more AI-generated content. This means that AI models will be trained on AI-generated content, creating a cycle of garbage. Marcus puts it succinctly: "But eventually, no one will create good, fresh, new content anymore, and the internet will start eating its own tail. We will all end up suffering, fed a stew of mediocrity."