AI is one of the most profound technologies humanity is working on. Whether it’s helping reporters sort through thousands of documents, or enabling people to access information in their own language, AI opens up new opportunities that could significantly improve billions of lives.

What is artificial intelligence?

Artificial intelligence refers to any computer system taught to mimic natural human intelligence, such as programs taught to play board games, have conversations, summarize information, and create content.

Google's mission

Our mission is to organize the world's information, and make it universally accessible and useful - and making AI helpful for everyone gives us so many opportunities to deliver this mission.

While the shift to AI may feel sudden to some, at Google, we’ve been applying it to our products for a while. It’s already integral to many of our products that billions of people use everyday, giving us so many opportunities to deliver on our mission.

• Powering 12 billion visual searches a month on Google Lens to help people search for what they see

• Enabling us to map over 1 billion buildings globally on Google Maps to help people explore the real world

• Helping more than 3 billion people benefit from AI-powered features in Google Workspace, such as Smart Compose and Smart Reply in Gmail

Making AI helpful for everyone is how we’ll continue to advance our mission.

Building AI responsibly must be a collective effort involving researchers, social scientists, industry experts, governments, creators, publishers and people using AI in their daily lives.

At Google, we build and deploy AI in a way that maximizes the positive benefits to society while addressing the challenges, guided by our AI Principles, first published in 2018:

Google's AI Principles

1. Be socially responsible
2. Avoid creating or reinforcing unfair bias
3. Be built and tested for safety
4. Be accountable to people
5. Incorporate privacy design principles
6. Uphold high standards of scientific excellence
7. Be made available for uses that accord with these principles

With this bold and responsible approach, we’re taking the next steps to make AI — including generative AI — even more helpful for everyone. And we’re working together with others to get it right.

As AI continues to develop, together we as an ecosystem have a shared goal to:

• Boldly engage users with new AI formats
• Responsibly give publishers control over their content
• Fight misinformation, together

At Google, we’re investing in new AI formats to engage users with information they are interested in seeing from a range of diverse perspectives.

What are AI Overviews?

With AI Overviews, people can ask their most complex questions, and quickly get information and links to dive deeper on a wide range of relevant websites, content, and perspectives.

This builds on our long history of delivering direct answers to queries, powered by AI, while driving traffic to the web. With AI Overviews, we've found that people use Search more, are more satisfied with their results, and are visiting a greater diversity of websites.

Our approach to AI Overviews

• Continue to focus on sending valuable traffic to publishers and creators by putting links at the forefront of the experience
  
• Start with more complex queries, where it may be helpful to get information from a range of web pages – for example, “how do I get marks off painted walls.”
  
• For sensitive queries, like topics that are rapidly changing or significantly impact the health, financial stability, safety of people, like breaking news, AI Overviews are less likely to appear.

Publishers need greater choice and control over how their content is used for emerging generative AI use cases. The ecosystem needs simple and scalable solutions providing transparency and control.

What is Google-Extended?

In 2023, we launched Google Extended - a new control through robots.txt that web publishers can use to manage whether their sites help improve Gemini and Vertex AI generative APIs, including future generations of models.

By using Google-Extended to control access to content on a site, a website administrator can choose whether to help these AI models become more accurate and capable over time.

Google supports academics, industry experts and publishers to utilize AI technologies to fight misinformation through research and collaboration.

We know that there is potential for AI technologies to add additional complexity to misinformation challenges, but we also believe along with industry experts that AI has the potential to help us detect misinformation more quickly.

How Google works with the fact check community

We work with the fact check community in a number of ways, such as:

• Supporting research projects on how Generative AI can help fight misinformation
• Strengthen quality information and tackle harmful content
• Investing in tools and products like SynthID, About this image, and Fact Check Tools

Google's tools for fighting misinformation

• SynthID
  SynthID is a tool for watermarking and identifying AI-generated images, audio, text, and video which helps to prevent the spread of misinformation

• About This Image
  About This Image helps users get more context to evaluate visual content that they come across, including when the image and similar images were first indexed by Google, where it may have first appeared, and where else it’s been seen online, like on news, social, or fact checking sites

• Fact Check Tools
  Fact Check Tools give journalists and fact checkers a deeper way to learn about an image or a topic. Powered by Claim Review markup (which helps to surface fact-checks on the web), Fact Check Explorer lets users find fact checks which have been investigated by independent fact checkers from around the world

Along with Fact Check Tools, these Google products now have new AI features, designed to help you day-to-day:

• Pinpoint
  Pinpoint simplifies complex research tasks associated with producing high quality news - whether that’s investigative reporting, fact checking, combing through archives, or sifting through notes, audio recordings, and video interviews.

• News Consumer Insights
  News Consumer Insights is an AI-powered reporting assistant from Google built for news organizations of all sizes. Get custom reports, insights, and recommendations, based on your organization's Google Analytics.

• Gemini
  Gemini is our most capable and general model yet, helping you boost your productivity, accelerate your ideas and fuel your curiosity in Docs, Sheets, Slides and more, by helping you write, visualize, organize, and connect in your favorite Google apps.