Google Search’s ‘AI Overviews’ Produce False and Potentially Dangerous Information
Summary from the AllSides News Team
Google’s recently-launched AI-powered overviews of search results faced widespread criticism this week over inaccurate and potentially harmful answers.
‘Add glue to pizza sauce’: High-profile examples of AI mistakes included one result in which an AI overview responded to the query “cheese not sticking to pizza” with, “You can also add about ⅛ cup of non-toxic glue to the sauce to give it more tackiness.” This appeared to draw from an 11-year-old Reddit comment. Other AI results contained misinformation; in one case, it incorrectly said former President Barack Obama was Muslim, mistakenly drawing from the title of a book chapter on Muslims in America.
Conflict of Interest? Online news outlets across the political spectrum — whose SEO-driven revenue models are threatened by Google Search’s AI overviews — piled onto the tech giant on Thursday and Friday, often highlighting that Google told people to “glue pizza and eat rocks.” Sensationalism was common; Salon (Left bias) said Google was “spewing inaccurate, dangerous answers,” and the New York Post (Lean Right bias) said Google was “being slammed as a ‘disaster.’” Regardless of the validity of Google’s critics, this unified slew of negative attention could reflect an incentive for online publishers to take down a threat to their bottom line.
Featured Coverage of this Story
From the Left
Google promised a better search experience — now it’s telling us to put glue on our pizza
Imagine this: you’ve carved out an evening to unwind and decide to make a homemade pizza. You assemble your pie, throw it in the oven, and are excited to start eating. But once you get ready to take a bite of your oily creation, you run into a problem — the cheese falls right off. Frustrated, you turn to Google for a solution.
“Add some glue,” Google answers. “Mix about 1/8 cup of Elmer’s glue in with the sauce. Non-toxic glue will work.”
So, yeah, don’t do that. As of writing...
From the Center
Google’s “AI Overview” can give false, misleading, and dangerous answers
If you use Google regularly, you may have noticed the company's new AI Overviews providing summarized answers to some of your questions in recent days. If you use social media regularly, you may have come across many examples of those AI Overviews being hilariously or even dangerously wrong.
Factual errors can pop up in existing LLM chatbots as well, of course. But the potential damage that can be caused by AI inaccuracy gets multiplied when those errors appear atop the ultra-valuable web real estate of the Google search results page.
"The examples we've seen are generally very uncommon queries and aren’t representative of most people’s...
From the Right
Google AI Advises Glue on Pizza, Tobacco for Teens
Google’s AI-generated search results are already being slammed as a “disaster” that “can no longer be trusted,” the New York Post reports.
Absurd “AI Overview” glitches began right as Google began rolling out the feature to U.S. users last week, with plans to offer it to 1 billion users by the end of 2024.
Its bizarre recommendations include adding 1/8 of a cup of non-toxic glue to tomato sauce to help cheese stick to pizza, along with the health benefits of tobacco for kids.
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