Quoting Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media
Simon Willison · Simon Willison · 2026-06-04
Simon Willison highlights a 404 Media report that Google pressured the outlet after publication to replace its official statement, with the revised version removing language saying 'it's critical that we maintain humans in the loop,' in the context of a story about employees sharing memes about poor AI performance.
Extraction
Topics: ai-ethicscorporate-communicationshuman-oversightgoogle
Claims
- Google asked 404 Media to replace a published official statement after the article ran, with the new version removing the phrase 'it's critical that we maintain humans in the loop.'
- Google employees were sharing internal memes criticizing the quality of Google's AI products, which prompted the original 404 Media story.
Key quotes
After this story was published Google's spokesperson reached out and asked us to publish a slightly different version of that statement. The new statement no longer stated that 'it's critical that we maintain humans in the loop.'