Companies like Google tend to make a lot of bold claims to convince people that their products are best. Chrome is one such product. Previously, Google claimed that using Chrome gives the most secure experience on Windows (in an attempt to push users away from Microsoft Edge). Now, Google says AI makes the “web safer”, but how?
After some recent updates, if you open Google Chrome, some of you might see a pop-up message “AI in Chrome helps make the web faster, safer, and more accessible” with just one actionable button “Got it”. Google isn’t allowing you to opt out of the Chrome AI experience, and this pop-up is part of some campaigns.
Windows Latest looked into the source code of Chromium to understand what’s going on with these alerts, and we spotted that “AI in Chrome helps make the web faster, safer, and more accessible” is part of a campaign called “EENGAGEMENT_PROMO_AI_BENEFITS”.
“AI in Chrome helps make the web faster, safer, and more accessible” isn’t the only ad campaign you might come across when using Google Chrome on Windows 11 (and Windows 10).
According to another reference seen by Windows Latest, you might also see pop-ups to “Organize your tabs with help from AI,” which goes on to highlight how AI can assist you in managing your tabs more efficiently.
Another reference, “Create your own theme with AI to give your browser a unique look,” talks about using AI to design personalized themes for Chrome. The fourth reference, “Write with more confidence with help from AI,” talks about AI-powered tools to improve writing.
Lastly, “Explore AI” invites you to try out these features.
But how is even Google using “AI” to protect you on Windows 11, and offer a “safer web” experience? We really don’t know, but one of the Google’s promotional pop-ups also has a link to its documentation that claims Chrome’s Enhanced protection now uses “AI” to protect you, and detect new “security threats.
“Enhanced Protection uses AI to detect new security threats even faster and protects you when you use Chrome and other Google products,” Google noted.
It was not possible for me to verify how Enhanced Protection is using AI to protect Chrome, but when we checked Chrome Canary, we noticed that Google has already renamed the “Enhanced Protection” description to mention “AI” advancements.
“Real-time, AI-powered protection against dangerous sites, downloads, and extensions that’s based on your browsing data getting sent to Google,” the updated descriptions read.
Google needs to do better with these ad campaign as some of its own users were confused as to what happened when they saw the pop-up of AI in Chrome.
“I know is that Google’s AI uses a lot of stolen work, that it does not make anything faster aside from the flow of money into the pockets of CEOs, and that I did not opt-in to any AI services,” one of the frustrated users noted in a forum post.
“Nowhere on the internet has got any solutions on how to get rid of this AI, so I need help to figure out how to get rid of it,” they added.
Microsoft also has AI integrated into Edge with the new Copilot, but we haven’t seen the company nagging users with pop-ups seen in Chrome.
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