Google introduces ‘SGE while browsing’ to summarize web articles and kill your attention span

Okay, obviously the title is a joke, but I feel the need to state it outright. If you’re someone who gets bogged down with long web articles (I know I tend to ramble sometimes), then you’ll probably be happy to hear that Google is introducing an AI-powered summaries feature for you. As a part of its Search Generative Experience (SGE), which is available to anyone opted into the company’s Labs program, you’ll now be able to condense any web article in Chrome for Android and iOS down to just a handful of bullet points.

Tapping the ‘Generate’ button at the bottom of your screen, as shown above, will give you a set of AI-generated “key points” from an article. Then, tapping on one of the ‘Explore on this page’ sections shown here will anchor you to that highlight in said article, which I think is pretty cool.

Google clarifies that this will only work on freely available articles, and won’t summarize paywalled content, so don’t expect to use this as a new trick to get out of a subscription. If you don’t yet see this feature, just wait a few days, as it’s going through a staged rollout, per usual. I guess you can try it out while reading this if you don’t like my usual friendly, casual (read: cheesy) tone.

All jokes aside, I do wonder what this will do to authorship on the web and our attention span for that matter. Will you read articles anymore or just get the “TikTok”-style short form content version instead? Let me know in the comments!