If you Google anything these days you may have noticed an AI Overview popping up as the top result, but as this BritBox price example shows it won’t necessarily give you the right information!
Double-checking the price of a BritBox subscription in the US, we googled it and the AI Overview proudly boasted the price in the US is $6.99 a month. Actually, we then googled it again and it changed its mind and told us it was $9.99 a month! Clearly, something is confusing the AI Overview about the BritBox price and we took the much safer option of going to the official BritBox site which told us the price is in fact $8.99 a month, $89.99 per year. So, if you were hoping to watch great TV series on BritBox like The Responder and Grace, then you might be rather confused as to what the actual price is if you’d stuck to the AI Overview!
As a further test we tried the price of Netflix in the US and to be fair the AI Overview did actually give us the right prices for the various subscription plans Netflix offers.Â
Surely though it would make more sense for Google to put the official website at the top of the search rather than the AI Overview, especially if it’s going to give you the wrong answer?!
There’s been a lot of debate over AI Overviews and how helpful they are to the user. Google defines the goal of the AI Overview as being: “AI Overviews appear in Google Search results when our systems determine that generative responses can be especially helpful — for example, when you want to quickly understand information from a range of sources, including information from across the web and Google’s Knowledge Graph.”
But it’s not that much help if it gives you the wrong answer! Now in the world of TV and movies, there’s only so much damage a wrong answer can give but the AI Overview has also been accused of giving dubious answers on health queries. It says at the bottom of the query “Generative AI is experimental” but surely then don’t put it at the top?
Anyway, our advice would be to go to an original trusted source rather than taking the AI Overview at face value or you might get an unpleasant surprise.
