Google AI Overviews were announced a couple of weeks ago at Google I/O, and they’ve already proven to be rather controversial. The aim to provide high-quality answers to your questions summarized from the web, but a series of recent X (formerly Twitter) threads show how big of a fail it’s already proven to be. The response that went viral involves a very dubious pizza recipe. As reported, when prompting Google for an answer to the issue of “cheese not sticking to pizza,” the AI Overview suggests adding nontoxic glue to your pizza to prevent the cheese from sliding off. The exact words the AI overview gave are as follows: “You can also add about 1/8 cup of non-toxic glue to the sauce to give it more tackiness.” Where did the Google AI overview get the info as a source? An 11-year-old Reddit comment from this thread, in what was clearly a joke. https://t.co/W09ssjvOkJ pic.twitter.com/6ALCbz6EjK — SG-r01 (@heavenrend) May 22, 2024 The words “cheese not sticking to pizza” generated this unexpected and funny response, and the internet is having a field day with it. The Google AI Overview response has since gone viral, with someone even trying glue pizza just to make the point. It should be noted that we’ve seen a massive uptick in Reddit and forum posts showing up higher in Google searches. It’s also worth noting that Reddit recently signed a $60 million deal to let Google train its models on Reddit content. It’s not hard to connect the dots on how this might have happened. It’s not just Reddit though. Another AI Overview was posted online with an answer to “how many rocks should I eat each day,” which pulls information directly from The Onion. her pic.twitter.com/FGbvO923gk — follow @bencollins on bluesky (@oneunderscore__) May 23, 2024 Part of the problem is the absolute conviction in which AI Overviews delivers its answers. It doesn’t bring up a link to an Onion article and let you do the adjudication. Instead, it treats every source like it’s Wikipedia and delivers information in complete confidence. Google claims that its AI Overviews give users high-quality information and that such errors are uncommon. Here is the official response provided to Digital Trends by Google: “The vast majority of AI Overviews provide high quality information, with links to dig deeper on the web. Many of the examples we’ve seen have been uncommon queries, and we’ve also seen examples that were doctored or that we couldn’t reproduce. We conducted extensive testing before launching this new experience, and as with other features we’ve launched in Search, we appreciate the feedback. We’re taking swift action where appropriate under our content policies, and using these examples to develop broader improvements to our systems, some of which have already started to roll out.” It seems as if some of these AI Overviews will be hard to correct if they can’t be reproduced. The “broader improvements” will need to be the solution, and since Google says they’re already in the works, hopefully we’ll begin to see some better searches soon. We’ll have to see if Google responds to the situation further beyond that statement. After receiving negative feedback around its image generation in Gemini earlier this year, Google had to apologize and pull it down to fix its issues. For now, though, these are both good reminders of how careful we need to be when trusting AI engines for information. Google AI Overview started rolling out to everyone in the U.S. earlier this month, and with more countries coming soon. But with answers like this, there may be more people reaching for a way to turn it off than Google expected. Over the past few months, AI chatbots offered by the top names, such as OpenAI and Meta, have been found engaged in problematic behavior, especially with young users. The latest investigation covers Gemini, noting that Google’s chatbot can share “inappropriate and unsafe” content with kids and teens. What’s new in the chatbot risk arena? What happened? Oliver McCann, who goes by the artist name imoliver, has signed a deal with a record label. That’s not unusual in and of itself, but what is striking is that all of his music has been created by AI, which he puts to self-penned lyrics. It’s apparently the first deal of its kind and came after one of his tracks hit three millions streams on Spotify, Associated Press reported. McCann’s deal is sure to stoke the controversial debate about the growing role of AI in the music industry. Why is this important? The domain of AI has quickly gone from seeking answers from a chatbot to getting multi-step web-based work done for you, like booking restaurant tables, adding stuff to your Amazon cart, and performing deep back-and-forth research. But it looks like the answers you get, especially when it comes to online shopping, depend on the AI chatbot you are using. “Platforms disagree on brand recommendations for 61.9% of queries,” says an analysis conducted by BrightEdge. The company assessed tens of thousands of shopping-related questions that were provided to ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, and Google’s AI Mode in Search.
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