In my early testing of the experimental feature, I found the blurbs more obnoxious than helpful. They appear at the top of the results page, so I.
Forcing AI for everyone: Google has been rolling out its AI Overviews to its US users over the last several days. While the company claims that the AI summaries that appear at the top of the results are mostly correct and fact-based, an alarming number of users have encountered so-called hallucinations – when an LLM states a falsehood as fact. Users aren’t impressed.
In my early testing of the experimental feature, I found the blurbs more obnoxious than helpful. They appear at the top of the results page, so I must scroll down to get to the material I want. They are frequently incorrect in the finer details and often plagiarize an article word for word. These annoyances prompted me to write last week’s article explaining several ways to bypass the intrusive feature now that Google is shoving it down our throats with no off switch.
Now that AI Overviews has had a few days to percolate in the public, users are finding many examples where the feature fails. Social media is flooded with funny and obvious examples of Google’s AI trying too hard. Keep in mind that people tend to shout when things go wrong and remain silent when they work as advertised.
“The examples we’ve seen are generally very uncommon queries and aren’t representative of most people’s experiences,” a Google spokesperson told Ars Technica. “The vast majority of AI Overviews provide high quality information, with links to dig deeper on the web.
