Latest news with #TermsofService
Vox
2 days ago
- Politics
- Vox
Trump just threw one of his most powerful allies under the bus
is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he focuses on the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the decline of liberal democracy in the United States. He received a JD from Duke University and is the author of two books on the Supreme Court. On Thursday evening, President Donald Trump publicly split with the Federalist Society, the powerful conservative lawyers' group that he relied on to select judges in his first term. Thanks in no small part to Trump, a majority of the Supreme Court justices are associated with the Federalist Society, as are dozens or even hundreds of other federal judges. But now, Trump apparently regrets his earlier partnership with the Society. SCOTUS, Explained Get the latest developments on the US Supreme Court from senior correspondent Ian Millhiser. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. 'I am so disappointed in The Federalist Society because of the bad advice they gave me on numerous Judicial Nominations,' Trump posted on Truth Social. He blames his decision to ally with the Society on the fact that he was 'new to Washington' when he first became president, 'and it was suggested that I use The Federalist Society as a recommending source on Judges.' He also names Leonard Leo, the co-chair of the Society's board, a 'sleazebag' who 'probably hates America, and obviously has his own separate ambitions.' It's a bold move by Trump, because the Federalist Society derives much of its power from the fact that so many of its members have lifetime appointments to the federal bench. Promising conservative lawyers want to join — and pay dues — to the Society because it was seen as a pipeline to power. And the fact that its members have been able to shape policy on everything from abortion to race to student loans made it the premier right-wing legal group. That's not to say Trump will destroy the Society's grip on the judiciary. In fact, he may have inadvertently strengthened it. Older Federalist Society judges and justices may be less likely to retire under Trump now that they know that he's unlikely to rely on the Society to choose their replacement. And sitting Federalist Society judges and justices may view the Trump administration's legal arguments with greater skepticism. Trump's breakup with the Federalist Society isn't particularly surprising. At a recent Federalist Society conference on executive power, many of the speakers denounced Trump's incompetence and warned that it would prevent conservatives from achieving lasting policy victories during this administration. Some argued that Trump's signature economic policy, his tariffs, are illegal. And Trump is right that Leo, and by extension, the Federalist Society and its judges, have 'separate ambitions' that do not always align with Trump or the MAGA movement. While the Federalist Society certainly has plenty of members who are staunch MAGA loyalists, many of its judges still adhere to the more libertarian and less explicitly authoritarian approach that dominated the Republican Party before Trump took it over. Speakers at the recent Federalist Society conference spoke openly about plans to diminish Trump's power and shift authority toward the judiciary. Nor did the Federalist Society's judges rally behind Trump's failed attempt to overturn former President Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 election. Some of them even actively pushed back – Trump-appointed Judge Stephanos Bibas's opinion rejecting one of Trump's attempts to overturn that election begins with the line 'free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy,' and rejects Trump's claims due to a lack of 'specific allegations and then proof.' In his Thursday night post announcing that he and Leo are never getting back together, Trump pointed to a recent decision by the US Court of International Trade, which struck down an array of Trump's second-term tariffs, as a triggering event. Notably, one of these three judges, Timothy Rief, is a Trump appointee. So it appears that one of the most fruitful partnerships in the conservative legal movement's history is now over. This divorce is likely to diminish both Trump's power and that of the Society in the long run. Trump is likely to pay a big price for breaking with one of America's most powerful institutions The Federalist Society is America's most powerful legal organization in large part because it has such a comprehensive network of right-leaning and right-wing lawyers. Top law students often join the Federalist Society because the Society can help place them in clerkships with some of the most prestigious judges. The Society's events give young lawyers a chance to network with senior members of their profession who can connect them with other hard-to-obtain job opportunities. And, because senior lawyers often have a decades-long relationship with the Society, the Society can easily vet them for ideological loyalty if they seek a political appointment such as a federal judgeship. Related The Federalist Society is surprisingly ambivalent about Trump This network also means that the Federalist Society has historically provided a valuable service to Republican presidents. If a federal judicial vacancy arises in, say, Idaho, the president and his top advisers are unlikely to know which members of the Idaho bar are both highly skilled and ideologically committed to the GOP's goals. But the Federalist Society has both a student and a lawyers' chapter in Idaho. So it can identify highly qualified right-wing candidates for the bench and pass that information on to the White House. Without access to this network, Trump is likely to struggle to identify nominees as quickly as he did in his first term, and there are already signs that he's relying on alternative networks to find his second term judges — a shift that may diminish the Society's influence in the long run, because lawyers hoping for a political appointment will no longer gain an advantage by joining it. When Trump announced his first slate of second-term nominees in early May, for example, half of them were lawyers in GOP-controlled state attorney general's offices. These offices might provide Trump with a stream of loyal nominees in red states, but it is unclear how he will identify judicial candidates in blue states where elected officials are unlikely to fill their offices with lawyers sympathetic to the MAGA movement. Trump's split with the Federalist Society may prove to be one of the most consequential legal developments of his second term. The Federalist Society also provides right-of-center lawyers with a forum where they can debate their disagreements and often achieve consensus. Once such a consensus is reached, moreover, Federalist Society events help popularize that consensus among legal conservatives, while also communicating to ambitious young lawyers which policy positions they need to hold in order to secure the Society's aid when those lawyers seek political appointments. This means that judges chosen by the Society tend to have uniform views on a wide range of legal questions, even if those views are unusual within the legal profession as a whole. The Federalist Society, for example, has long popularized a theory known as the 'unitary executive,' which would give the president full control over all federal agencies, even if Congress tried to give those agencies' leaders a degree of independence. This theory played a central role in the Republican justices' shocking decision in Trump v. United States (2024), which established that the president has broad authority to use his official powers to commit crimes. If Trump stops drawing from the Federalist Society when he selects judges, in other words, his second-term nominees are likely to hold views that diverge from those of many sitting Republican judges, even if those nominees might broadly be described as 'conservative.' And that could set back the conservative cause. Before the Federalist Society's founding, for example, President Richard Nixon picked four justices that he believed to be conservative. But three of them joined the Court's abortion rights decision in Roe v. Wade (1973), and Nixon-appointed Justice Lewis Powell wrote a seminal opinion in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), which kept affirmative action alive for several decades. It's also possible that many sitting Federalist Society judges and justices will view Trump with greater skepticism now that he's no longer aligned with an organization that they closely identify with. Because the Federalist Society has been a central part of many lawyers' and judges' professional life for decades, these senior professionals often identify strongly with the Society and react negatively to perceived slights against it. In 2020, for example, the US Judicial Conference Committee on Codes of Conduct withdrew a proposal to discourage federal judges from belonging to ideological bar associations like the Federalist Society after that proposal triggered widespread backlash among judges aligned with the Society. When it comes to Trump, many of the lawsuits challenging his tariffs are backed by conservative legal organizations that historically have aligned with the Federalist Society; his attacks on the Federalist Society could make such organizations more likely to challenge him.
Vox
2 days ago
- Politics
- Vox
The Supreme Court just gave 500,000 immigrants some truly awful news
is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he focuses on the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the decline of liberal democracy in the United States. He received a JD from Duke University and is the author of two books on the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court handed down a very brief order on Friday, which effectively permits the Trump administration to strip half a million immigrants of their right to remain in the United States. The case is Noem v. Doe. Although the full Court did not explain why it reached this decision, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson penned a dissenting opinion, which was joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. SCOTUS, Explained Get the latest developments on the US Supreme Court from senior correspondent Ian Millhiser. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. As Jackson explains, the case involves 'nearly half a million Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan noncitizens' who are in the United States 'after fleeing their home countries.' The Department of Homeland Security previously granted these immigrants 'parole' status, which allows them to live in the United States for up to two years, and sometimes to work in this country lawfully. Shortly after Trump entered office, DHS issued a blanket order stripping these immigrants of their parole status, putting them at risk for removal. But, a federal district court blocked that order — ruling that DHS must decide whether each individual immigrant should lose their status on a case-by-case basis, rather than through an en masse order. Realistically, this district court order was unlikely to remain in effect indefinitely. In its brief to the justices, the Trump administration makes a strong argument that its decision to terminate these immigrants' status is legal, or, at least, that the courts cannot second-guess that decision. Among other things, the brief points to a federal law which provides that 'no court shall have jurisdiction to review' certain immigration-related decisions by the secretary of Homeland Security. And it argues that the secretary has the power to grant or deny parole because federal law gives them 'discretion' over who receives parole. Notably, Jackson's dissent does not question that the Trump administration is likely to prevail once this case is fully litigated. Instead, she argues that her Court's decision to effectively strip these immigrants of their status is premature. 'Even if the Government is likely to win on the merits,' Jackson writes, 'in our legal system, success takes time and the stay standards require more than anticipated victory.' Related The Supreme Court is manipulating its own calendar to lock GOP policies in place The primary disagreement between Jackson and her colleagues in the majority concerns the Court's aggressive use of its 'shadow docket' to benefit Trump and other conservative litigants. The shadow docket is a mix of emergency motions and other expedited matters that the justices decide without full briefing and oral argument. The Court typically only spends days or maybe a few weeks weighing whether to grant shadow docket relief, while it spends months or longer deciding cases on its ordinary docket. Since Jackson joined the Court in 2022, she's become the Court's most vocal internal critic of its frequent use of the shadow docket. As Jackson correctly notes in her Doe dissent, the Supreme Court has long said that a party seeking a shadow docket order blocking a lower court's decision must do more than demonstrate that they are likely to prevail. That party must also show that 'irreparable harm will befall them should we deny the stay.' When these two factors do not strongly tilt toward one party, the Court is also supposed to ask whether 'the equities and public interest' favor the party seeking a stay. Jackson criticizes her colleagues in the majority for abandoning these requirements. As she argues, the Trump administration has not shown an 'urgent need to effectuate blanket … parole terminations now.' She also argues that DHS 'does not identify any specific national-security threat or foreign-policy problem that will result' if these immigrants remain in the country for a few more months. And, even under the lower court's order, the government 'retains the ability to terminate … parole on a case-by-case basis should such a particular need arise.' Although the Court has never formally repudiated the requirement that parties seeking to stay a lower court order must prove irreparable harm, it often hands down shadow docket decisions that don't explicitly consider this requirement. Concurring in Labrador v. Poe (2024), Justice Brett Kavanaugh argued that, in many shadow docket cases, 'this Court has little choice but to decide the emergency application by assessing likelihood of success on the merits.' So Kavanaugh, at least, has stated openly that there are some cases where he will rule solely based on which side he thinks should win, regardless of whether that side has proven irreparable harm. Kavanaugh's concurring opinion was joined by Justice Amy Coney Barrett. In the short term, the Doe decision could lead to many immigrants losing their protections. Long term, the most significant aspect of the decision involves an internal dispute about how fast the Court may move when it disagrees with a lower court decision.
Vox
2 days ago
- Business
- Vox
Harvard just fired a tenured professor for the first time in 80 years. Good.
is a senior writer at Future Perfect, Vox's effective altruism-inspired section on the world's biggest challenges. She explores wide-ranging topics like climate change, artificial intelligence, vaccine development, and factory farms, and also writes the Future Perfect newsletter. The Harvard University crest on the Baker Library of the Harvard Business School in Boston on May 27. Sophie Park/Bloomberg via Getty Images In the summer of 2023, I wrote about a shocking scandal at Harvard Business School: Star professor Francesca Gino had been accused of falsifying data in four of her published papers, with whispers there was falsification in others, too. A series of posts on Data Colada, a blog that focuses on research integrity, documented Gino's apparent brazen data manipulation, which involved clearly changing study data to better support her hypotheses. Future Perfect Explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. This was a major accusation against a researcher at the top of her field, but Gino's denials were unconvincing. She didn't have a good explanation for what had gone wrong, asserting that maybe a research assistant had done it, even though she was the only author listed across all four of the falsified studies. Harvard put her on unpaid administrative leave and barred her from campus. The cherry on top? Gino's main academic area of study was honesty in business. As I wrote at the time, my read of the evidence was that Gino had most likely committed fraud. That impression was only reinforced by her subsequent lawsuit against Harvard and the Data Colada authors. Gino complained that she'd been defamed and that Harvard hadn't followed the right investigation process, but she didn't offer any convincing explanation of how she'd ended up putting her name to paper after paper with fake data. This week, almost two years after the news first broke, the process has reached its resolution: Gino was stripped of tenure, the first time Harvard has essentially fired a tenured professor in at least 80 years. (Her defamation lawsuit against the bloggers who found the data manipulation was dismissed last year.) What we do right and wrong when it comes to scientific fraud Harvard is in the news right now for its war with the Trump administration, which has sent a series of escalating demands to the university, canceled billions of dollars in federal grants and contracts, and is now blocking the university from enrolling international students, all in an apparent attempt to force the university to conform to MAGA's ideological demands. Stripping a celebrity professor of tenure might not seem like the best look at a moment when Harvard is in an existential struggle for its right to exist as an independent academic institution. But the Gino situation, which long predates the conflict with Trump, shouldn't be interpreted solely through the lens of that fight. Scientific fraud is a real problem, one that is chillingly common across academia. But far from putting the university in a bad light, Harvard's handling of the Gino case has actually been unusually good, even though it still underscores just how much further academia has to go to ensure scientific fraud becomes rare and is reliably caught and punished. There are two parts to fraud response: catching it and punishing it. Academia clearly isn't very good at the first part. The peer-review process that all meaningful research undergoes tends to start from the default assumption that data in a reviewed paper is real, and instead focuses on whether the paper represents a meaningful advance and is correctly positioned with respect to other research. Almost no reviewer is going back to check to see if what is described in a paper actually happened. Fraud, therefore, is often caught only when other researchers actively try to replicate a result or take a close look at the data. Science watchdogs who find these fraud cases tell me that we need a strong expectation that data be made public — which makes it much harder to fake — as well as a scientific culture that embraces replications. (Given the premiums journals put on novelty in research and the supreme importance of publishing for academic careers, there's been little motivation for scientists to pursue replication.). It is these watchdogs, not anyone at Harvard or in the peer-review process, who caught the discrepancies that ultimately sunk Gino. Crime and no punishment Even when fraud is caught, academia too often fails to properly punish it. When third-party investigators bring a concern to the attention of a university, it's been unusual for the responsible party to actually face consequences. One of Gino's co-authors on one of the retracted papers was Dan Ariely, a star professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. He, too, has been credibly accused of falsifying data: For example, he published one study that he claimed took place at UCLA with the assistance of researcher Aimee Drolet Rossi. But UCLA says the study didn't happen there, and Rossi says she did not participate in it. In a past case, he claimed on a podcast to have gotten data from the insurance company Delta Dental, which the company says it did not collect. In another case, an investigation by Duke reportedly found that data from a paper he co-authored with Gino had been falsified, but that there was no evidence Ariely had used fake data knowingly. Frankly, I don't buy this. Maybe an unlucky professor might once end up using data that was faked without their knowledge. But if it happens again, I'm not willing to credit bad luck, and at some point, a professor who keeps 'accidentally' using falsified or nonexistent data should be out of a job even if we can't prove it was no accident. But Ariely, who has maintained his innocence, is still at Duke. Or take Olivier Voinnet, a plant biologist who had multiple papers conclusively demonstrated to contain image manipulation. He was found guilty of misconduct and suspended for two years. It's hard to imagine a higher scientific sin than faking and manipulating data. If you can't lose your job for that, the message to young scientists is inevitably that fraud isn't really that serious. What it means to take fraud seriously Gino's loss of tenure, which is one of a few recent cases where misconduct has had major career consequences, might be a sign that the tides are changing. In 2023, around when the Gino scandal broke, Stanford's then-president Marc Tessier-Lavigne stepped down after 12 papers he authored were found to contain manipulated data. A few weeks ago, MIT announced a data falsification scandal with a terse announcement that the university no longer had confidence in a widely distributed paper 'by a former second-year PhD student.' It's reasonable to assume the student was expelled from the program. I hope that these high-profile cases are a sign we are moving in the right direction on scientific fraud because its persistence is enormously damaging to science. Other researchers waste time and energy following false lines of research substantiated by fake data; in medicine, falsification can outright kill people. But even more than that, research fraud damages the reputation of science at exactly the moment when it is most under attack. We should tighten standards to make fraud much harder to commit in the first place, and when it is identified, the consequences should be immediate and serious. Let's hope Harvard sets a trend.
Vox
3 days ago
- Politics
- Vox
The Supreme Court wants to make it easier to build
is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he focuses on the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the decline of liberal democracy in the United States. He received a JD from Duke University and is the author of two books on the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court handed down an opinion on Thursday that reads like it was written by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, the authors of an influential book arguing that excessive regulation of land use and development has made it too difficult to build housing and infrastructure in the United States. (Ezra is also a co-founder of Vox.) Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado concerns a proposed railroad line that would run through 88 miles of Utah, connecting the state's oil-rich Uinta Basin to the broader national rail network. The line is expected to make it easier to transport crude oil extracted in this region to refineries elsewhere in the country. The Court's opinion in Seven County places strict new limits on a federal law that a lower court relied upon to prevent this line from being constructed — limits that should make it easier for developers to build large-scale projects. SCOTUS, Explained Get the latest developments on the US Supreme Court from senior correspondent Ian Millhiser. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Before this rail project can move forward, it must be approved by the Surface Transportation Board. Under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), moreover, this board is required to produce an environmental impact statement, which identifies any significant environmental effects from the rail project as well as ways to mitigate those effects. Significantly, as Justice Brett Kavanaugh explains in the Court's Seven County opinion, 'NEPA imposes no substantive environmental obligations or restrictions' on the board or on any other federal agency. It requires agencies to identify potential environmental harms that could arise out of development projects that they approve, but once those harms are identified in an environmental impact statement, the agency is free to decide that the benefits of the project outweigh those harms. Nevertheless, NEPA is often a significant hindrance to land development because litigants who oppose a particular project — be they environmental groups or just private citizens looking to shut development down — can often sue, claiming that the federal agency that must approve the project did not prepare an adequate environmental impact statement. As a result, Kavanaugh writes in his Seven County opinion, 'litigation-averse ever more time…to prepare ever longer EISs for future projects.' Indeed, the Seven County case itself is a poster child for just how burdensome NEPA can be. The Surface Transportation Board produced an environmental impact statement that is more than 3,600 pages long, and it goes into great detail about the rail line's potential impact on topics ranging from water quality to vulnerable species, such as the greater sage-grouse. Nevertheless, a federal appeals court blocked the project because it determined that this 3,600-page report did not adequately discuss the environmental impacts of making it easier to extract oil from the Uinta Basin. The appeals court reasoned that the agency needed to consider not just the direct environmental impacts of the rail line itself but also the impact of increased drilling and oil refining after the project is complete. All eight of the justices that heard the Seven County case (Justice Neil Gorsuch was recused) agreed that this appeals court decision was wrong, although Kavanaugh's majority opinion for himself and his Republican colleagues is broader than a separate opinion by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. The justices' agreement in Seven County, moreover, mirrors a growing bipartisan consensus that NEPA has become too much of a burden to development. As Kavanaugh notes in his opinion, President Joe Biden signed legislation in 2023 that limits environmental impact statements to 150 pages and requires them to be completed in two years or less. Still, Kavanaugh's opinion goes even further, repeatedly instructing courts to be deferential to an agency's decision to greenlight a project after producing an environmental impact statement. Seven County significantly weakens NEPA One striking thing about Kavanaugh's opinion is how closely it mirrors the rhetoric of liberal proponents of an 'abundance' agenda, which seeks to raise American standards of living by promoting large infrastructure projects. These proponents often claim that well-meaning laws intended to advance liberal values can have the opposite effect when they impose too many burdens on developers. As Kavanaugh argues, NEPA has 'transformed from a modest procedural requirement into a blunt and haphazard tool' that even stymies clean energy projects ranging 'from wind farms to hydroelectric dams, from solar farms to geothermal wells.' Related A new Supreme Court opinion is terrible news if you care about clean water Broadly speaking, Kavanaugh's opinion imposes two limits on future NEPA lawsuits. The first is simply a blunt statement that courts should be highly reluctant to second-guess an agency's decision that it has conducted an adequate environmental review. As Kavanaugh writes, 'the bedrock principle of judicial review in NEPA cases can be stated in a word: Deference.' Kavanaugh also criticizes the appeals court for blocking one project — the Utah rail line — because of the environmental impacts of 'geographically separate projects that may be built' as a result of that rail line, such as an oil refinery elsewhere in the country. As Kavanaugh writes, 'the effects from a separate project may be factually foreseeable, but that does not mean that those effects are relevant to the agency's decisionmaking process or that it is reasonable to hold the agency responsible for those effects.' Both Kavanaugh and the separate opinion by Justice Sotomayor also point to the fact that 'the Board here possesses no regulatory authority over those separate projects.' That is, while the transportation board is tasked with approving rail lines, other agencies are in charge of regulating projects, such as oil wells or refineries. As Sotomayor writes, an agency is not required to consider environmental harms that it has 'no authority to prevent.' So Seven County is a fairly significant victory for land developers as well as for traditional libertarians and for liberal proponents of an abundance agenda. It significantly weakens a statute that has long been a bête noire of developers.
Vox
3 days ago
- Business
- Vox
What is Google even for anymore?
is a senior technology correspondent at Vox and author of the User Friendly newsletter. He's spent 15 years covering the intersection of technology, culture, and politics at places like The Atlantic, Gizmodo, and Vice. Somewhere between asking Google's new advanced AI to explain, in detail, how to become an expert birdwatcher in my neighborhood and using Google's new AI moviemaking tool to create cartoons of my 4-pound Chihuahua fighting crime, I realized something. Either Google is having a midlife crisis or I am. It could be both. User Friendly A weekly dispatch to make sure tech is working for you, instead of overwhelming you. From senior technology correspondent Adam Clark Estes. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. I've spent the past week tinkering with Google's new AI tools, and I can confidently say the company is somewhere between crisis and glory. It may take years before we know which path wins. Google has dominated not only the way we use the web but also the web's very existence for the last 15 years, mainly through its search and advertising divisions. As AI encroaches on every corner of our digital experience, it's not clear which company will dominate the next era or how we'll interact with it. It almost certainly won't be by typing keywords into a search engine. To find something online today, you typically type some keywords into Google, pick a blue link that you think has the information you're after, and click. Companies bid on search terms in order to get their ads in front of people browsing the web, powering Google's multibillion-dollar advertising business. Your click helps publishers, including Vox, make money from ads they host on their sites, many of which Google manages. Google is dominant enough that two federal judges recently ruled that it's operating as an illegal monopoly, and the company is currently waiting to see if it will be broken up. As AI encroaches on every corner of our digital experience, it's not clear which company will dominate the next era or how we'll interact with it. The government might not be the biggest threat to Google dominance, however. AI has been chipping away at the foundation of the web in the past couple of years, as people have increasingly turned to tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity to find information online. These AI chatbots pull information from websites and present you with a tidy summary. This has become a real enough threat to Google that the number of Google searches in Safari fell for the first time ever in April. Google also recently saw its share of the search market dip below 90 percent for the first time in a decade, as AI search takes off. TikTok isn't helping either. Google recognized this inevitability a few years ago and has been trying to reinvent itself accordingly. A couple years ago, it rolled out AI Overviews, which are summaries of search results created by Google's large language model, Gemini. Then Google expanded on that concept earlier this year with AI Mode, a chatbot-based search experience also powered by Gemini that looks an awful lot like ChatGPT and Perplexity. The company announced last week that AI Mode will be rolling out to everyone in the United States in the coming weeks — just look for a sparkly button on the righthand side of the search field that says 'AI Mode.' AI Mode is how I've been trying to learn birding for the past week. Instead of plugging keywords into the old Google search box, I've been entering complex queries and getting back detailed reports. From one three-sentence prompt, AI Mode returned nearly 600 words. There were just nine links to sources, none of which I needed to click, since the chatbot had already summarized the content therein. Only by doing a little bit of digging did I realize that one of the main sources for this summary was a beginner's guide to birdwatching written by my Vox colleague Allie Volpe. This search experience, as is the case with other AI chatbots, is not always awesome. The technology is powered by large language models, which are prone to hallucinations, and so these new search tools tend to be unreliable. Then again, because AI tends to write such convincing copy, you're not always compelled to double-check the results. Publishers are seeing huge declines in traffic from Google as more people bypass the web and ask AI chatbots for information. As I learned from my birding research, it's quicker. And let's be honest, not everything you find from clicking a blue link is 100 percent accurate either. This is probably what the future of search looks like, and no, it almost certainly won't involve a list of blue links. It's unnerving for me to admit that I like the new Google. And I expect to see a lot more of it. As part of its blitz of AI announcements, Google also rolled out Gemini in Chrome, which lets the AI assistant see what you're seeing on a website. (It's currently only available for people who subscribe to Google AI Plus or AI Ultra plans or for people running beta versions of Chrome.) You can ask questions about what's on the page or ask Gemini to summarize an article. The tool can even analyze YouTube videos in real time. You can almost think of this as a more targeted version of what the new AI Mode search experience does for the entire web, and it seems useful. This is probably what the future of search looks like, and no, it almost certainly won't involve a list of blue links. While you'll undoubtedly be able to access the traditional search experience for quite some time, the sheer volume of Google's latest announcements suggests that AI everything is where we're headed. Headlines around that news echoed the gravity of it all. Reporting from Google's developer conference, Platformer's Casey Newton said, 'everything is changing and normal and scary and chill.' Tech analyst Ben Thompson declared 'the death of the ad-supported web,' thanks to Google. New York magazine's John Herrman put it more bluntly: 'Google is burying the web alive.' In the chaotic, early days of the web, Google got popular by simplifying the intimidating task of finding things online, as the Washington Post's Geoffrey A. Fowler points out. Its supremacy in this new AI-powered future is far less certain. Maybe another startup will come along and simplify things this time around, so you can have a user-friendly bot explain things to you, book travel for you, and make movies for you. In the meantime, I'll be trying to perfect my AI-generated crime-fighting Chihuahua cartoon, wondering when any of this will start to feel glorious. A version of this story was also published in the User Friendly newsletter. Sign up here so you don't miss the next one!
