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AIAAIC-1499

Google AI Overviews tell users to add glue to pizzas

Google’s “AI Overviews” feature was criticised for providing factually inaccurate, misleading and nonsensical answers, leading to questions about its reliability and potential to spout misinformation and perpetuate bias. The AI-generated summaries, which appear at the top of Google’s search results, were found to contain basic factual errors. In one instance, users reported that AI Overviews suggested using "non-toxic glue" to stop cheese sliding off pizza , which was traced back to a troll post. It also recommended people consume rocks, based on a satirical article from The Onion which had humorously claimed that eating rocks could be beneficial. I t also advised a user to drink urine for kidney stones, made a false claim that Barack Obama was the first Muslim president of the United States, incorrectly stated that “astronauts have met cats on the moon” and claimed that "Neil Armstrong said, ‘One small step for man’ because it was a cat’s step" . After a public backlash, Google said it would refine AI Overviews by limiting which queries generate AI summaries, particularly avoiding those that might yield nonsensical or satirical results, and taking action against specific outputs that violated its content policies. E xperts expressed concerns about the potential for the system to perpetuate bias and misinformation - e rrors seen as particularly problematic given the prominence of Google’s search results page . Hallucination (artificial intelligence) In the field of artificial intelligence (AI), a hallucination or artificial hallucination (also called bullshitting, confabulation or delusion) is a response generated by AI that contains false or misleading information presented as fact . Source: Wikipedia 🔗 System 🤖 Google AI Overviews Documents 📃 Google. AI Overviews: About last week Operator: Google users Developer: Google Country: USA Sector: Multiple Purpose: Generate search results Technology: Generative AI; Machine learning Issue: Accuracy/reliability; Bias/discrimination; Mis/disinformation

Date it happened
2024-05-01
Organisation involved
Google
Product, system or model
AI Overviews
Where this came from
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