Marianne Aubin Le Quéré
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Center for Information Technology Policy, Princeton University
Talk recording
The introduction of generative AI into popular search engines is fundamentally shifting the way that users access and evaluate information online. In this talk, I will present the results of a large-scale audit of AI-generated search summaries, spanning all 3,000+ U.S. counties. I show that Google's AI Overviews are generated at very high rates even in information-sparse environments, and that summaries generated for lower-resourced counties disproportionately draw on databases and aggregators over local news or government sources. A crowdworker experiment further demonstrates that AI Overviews are perceived as significantly higher quality and more credible than traditional search results, regardless of underlying source distributions. This phenomenon may constitute the systematic transformation of low-quality sources into authoritative outputs that obscure cues users would previously rely on to assess information quality. At the end of this talk, I will explore how these findings gesture at a deeper tension: the tools that make information easier to consume may simultaneously make it harder to evaluate.
About the speaker
Marianne Aubin Le Quéré is a postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy and an Incoming Assistant Professor at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Aubin Le Quéré’s work traces how AI and other emerging technologies impact online news and civic information ecosystems, and her active areas of research include understanding the impact of increasingly generative AI information ecosystems on society, researching models for human-centered informedness, and developing tools, frameworks, and guidelines for LLMs as a research method. She leverages mixed-method techniques to drive insights in the fields of social computing, computational social science, and communication. Aubin Le Quéré completed her PhD in Information Science at Cornell in 2025, and holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science and Nonfiction from Brown University.
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