That doesn't make any sense. This is really gonna hurt google, and if they were doing it to cash out, they'd have a premium search service for people to pay up for.
You know, it's weird how in the 2000s we were all hyped up by some AI as being able to make jobs safer and life easier, and now AI is something we dread, alongside a whole lot of other tech.
"Oh look, ANOTHER thing that's a touchscreen that no one asked for. ANOTHER AI that's going to be forced on me that no one asked for. I hate the future bro."
I’ve noticed it with people a lot younger than me also finding the stuff to be obnoxious and stupid.
Mainly it’s because the majority of modern tech is built to do shit for finance and ads.
Grubhub was cool at first, mainly because a UI to to look at menus of restaurants and order without having to do everything verbally, the order could still be messed up BUT at least we all agree that this is what the buyer wanted.
Gmail having a search UI was a big deal at the time.
Tumblr giving you an editor and a combined UI for uploading / posting and editing the page was a huge deal.