Google's toying with nonsense AI-made headlines on articles like ours in the Discover feed, so please don't blame me for clickbait like 'BG3 players exploit children'

Pop quiz, hotshot: what was the headline on this article when you clicked on it? Was it classic PC Gamer style—witty, insightful, with the rare power of capturing the essence of a story with neither artifice nor evasion, and unintentionally but unmistakably implying the incredible mental powers and physical beauty of the writer? Or did it say something like "The headlines are all screwed"?

If the latter, bad luck sport: you may have fallen prey to Google's latest experiment with its Discover newsfeed, replacing human-created headlines with sometimes-meaningless AI slop. As spotted by The Verge, one of the corporation's latest AI adventures is cramming it into your news feed, taking headlines like ours and condensing them into something at best shorter and clickbait-ier, and at worst actively nonsensical.

So, for instance, Lincoln's headline, "'Child labor is unbeatable': Baldur's Gate 3 players discover how to build an army of unkillable kids through the power of polymorph and German media laws" became, ah, "BG3 players exploit children." Harvey's "Schedule 1 creator had a backup plan if Steam rejected it—pack up the product, don a farmer's hat, and 'pivot it to be a farming game' like Stardew Valley" became the completely incomprehensible "Schedule 1 farming backup".

It's not just us it's happening to, of course (though you may, and perhaps should, get angry about the bastardisation of our precious words most of all). Poor Ars Technica, for instance, had an article with the original headline "Valve’s Steam Machine looks like a console, but don’t expect it to be priced like one." All very reasonable. Google's AI turned that into "Steam Machine price revealed," which is actively misleading.

That last one really sticks in my craw. Those of you who studied something useful at university and therefore don't work in journalism might not be aware of this, but Google has certain rules it likes sites like ours to follow, and woe betide any who violate them, because they could find themselves demoted in the algorithm. The rules mostly make sense! For instance, ol' Goog is very insistent that sites don't write things like 'release date revealed' in the headlines for articles that, you know, aren't about a release date being revealed, or which are actually about a wide release window. Entirely fair.

Then, of course, Google's own hallucination engine turns around and slaps precisely that kind of misleading headline on Ars Technica's story, which did not have a misleading headline originally. It feels like a bad joke for the corporation to throw out its own rules like this in pursuit of slapping a shareholder-powered "AI-driven" badge on yet another enshittified product.

Even worse, Google tucks away its "AI-generated" notice behind a See More button, leaving readers likely to assume the terrible headlines belong to the sites in question themselves.

"These screenshots show a small UI experiment for a subset of Discover users," a Google rep told 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." Well, I'd say mission failed on that front. With any luck, this is an experiment that's soon to end.

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