Google TV is rolling an experimental new feature called AI News Briefs to select users in the U.S. It’s powered by the company’s Gemini large language models, and the intention is to provide a brief overview of the top news stories of the day, curated from “trusted news sources”.
Those who have been randomly selected to get the new feature will see it on the “For You” page on the Google TV menu.
The company said the news tidbits are chosen and summarised by Gemini, though it says there’s also some “human evaluation” that goes into the mix. They’ll provide a brief overview of the story, and also surface YouTube videos from those trusted sources, so users can click on them to learn more.
“Briefs are updated with top stories throughout the day, so you can easily keep up with the latest news,” Google enthused in its announcement.
Because it’s still an experimental feature, there are no guarantees that the AI-generated news briefs will come to every user. It all depends on how well it’s received, and it’s not clear if users will appreciate it. While some may welcome being updated with what’s going on in the world, others may see it as an intrusion that distracts them from their TV watching.
With any luck, the “human evaluation” that Google mentioned will avoid the feature running into any issues such as the one that Apple’s new AI-powered news notifications ran into recently. Apple was hit with a complaint from the BBC due to the way its algorithm generated “misleading” headlines.
That complaint referred to an AI-generated summary that appeared to show that the BBC had written a story claiming that Luigi Mangione, the suspect arrested for the murder of U.S. healthcare insurance executive Brian Thompson, had shot himself. The BBC published no such article, and the suspect is still very much alive and well, albeit in police custody.
Apple responded by taking its AI news summaries offline when it rolled out the iOS 18.3 update, and has not said if it plans to revive the feature.
