Sean Hollister, the Verge:

I read a lot of my bedtime news via Google Discover, aka “swipe right on your Samsung Galaxy or Google Pixel homescreen until you see a news feed appear,” and that’s where these new AI headlines are beginning to show up.

[…]

But in the seeming attempt to boil down every story to four words or less, Google’s new headline experiment is attaching plenty of misleading and inane headlines to journalists’ work, and with little disclosure that Google’s AI is rewriting them.

Rewriting headlines may be new to Google Discover, but it is not new to Google. In fact, some research indicates page titles and descriptions are automatically rewritten more often than not in search results, and I am of two minds about this practice. It robs publishers and website owners of agency over how they present themselves through an important source of referral traffic. Google’s automatic rewrites are — as I have experienced in search results and as documented by Hollister in Discover — sometimes wrong, and have the effect of putting words in authors’ mouths.

Still, the titles and descriptions supplied by webpages are sometimes inaccurate, too — often deliberately. Sometimes, there are people writing clickbait headlines; it is common practice in search engine optimization circles. For search results, Google tends to generate headlines that are less clickbait-y than might appear in the original publication. However, Hollister shows examples from Discover where Google’s version is entirely misleading. And Google is not the only company doing automatic clickbait nonsense.

Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media:

Instagram is generating headlines for users’ Instagram posts without their knowledge, seemingly in an attempt to get those posts to rank higher in Google Search results.

[…]

Google told me that it is not generating the headlines, and that it’s pulling the text directly from Instagram. Meta acknowledged my request for comment but did not respond in time for publication. I’ll update this story if I hear back.

Meta’s Andy Stone, once again not on Threads but instead on Bluesky, quoted Joseph Cox’s link to the story writing:

Reports the outlet that definitely does not, ever, write clickbait-y, SEO-optimized headlines

This, obviously, does not meaningfully challenge Maiberg’s reporting, as it is Instagram generating these page titles specifically for Google whether users like it or not. This is just distracting nonsense. I wonder if being a dishonest asshole is a job description for Meta’s communications department.