by 
T
his week on The Brief we’re cutting through the fluff and going directly to the ‘source’ (a pun that will pay off in the next sentence): Google lets you hand-pick your preferred sources, Amazon licenses the tech behind their AI shopping assistant, and Spotify launches the audiobooks for long-form articles.
All three stories showcase small, incremental innovations…but their ripple effects aren’t equal. The 800-pound digital elephant in the room is Google’s ‘choose your sources’ update for Gemini. I’ve been intellectually lingering on this update, because while social media and its all-powerful algorithms surreptitiously used engagement signals to dictate which rabbit holes they would take us down, proactively shrinking our aperture of the internet to only the sources we want could create the largest filter bubble we’ve ever experienced.
As AI usage continues to soar, and companies like Google make AI Overviews + AI Mode the default for searching, I see these rabbit holes (e.g. our worldview) getting narrower, deeper, and further away from letting any other form of light in. On the other hand, AI citation is sporadic, unpredictable, and all over the place! So, I’m actually excited to use this feature and see if it enhances Gemini and other LLMs (who I’m sure will copy it). The key will be for us all to collectively check-in on ourselves, our queries, and our sources.