Google Trends interest in the search terms “AI risk” and “AI safety” sharpy increased on June 5th and remained high through August 1st before sharply returning to the previous trend of steady growth on August 2nd.
Why the period of increased interest? And why the sudden drop? What caused this?
The same effect happens for several AI-related queries—“perplexity AI”, “best AI”, “AI vacuum”, “AI printer”, “table AI” all have the same effect. The phenomenon seems to affect many AI-related queries, not just AI safety ones.
Great observation. If I remove “AI” from the searches, something strange is still happening the last week of July, but it seems you’re right that what’s happening is not AI safety / AI risk specific, so my interest in the phenomenon is now much reduced.
(I don’t know why this is showing up an an Answer rather than just a reply to a comment.)
could it be somehow related to counting of api-mediated searches invoked by LLMs? perhaps an api user switched APIs, then later google realized the api user existed and banned them?
This seems like it could plausibly have this effect? Though I have to admit I’m not entirely sure what “targeted stakeholder consultation” means. The picture that pops into my head is a bunch of older people getting emails about AI risk and then googling around to try and understand it.
Also the sharp drop-off at 1st August doesn’t fit perfectly with the six-week thing.