The internet is amused by atrocious answers cropping up in AI-assisted search, but it’s no laughing matter for Google.
Google’s new AI Overviews wants to give you tidy summations of search results, researched and written in mere seconds by generative AI. So far so good. The problem is, it sometimes gets stuff wrong.
How often? It’s hard to say just yet, though examples have been piling up in recent days. But even an occasional mistake is a bad look for a tool that’s supposed to be smarter and faster than you and me. Consider these flubs:
When asked how to keep cheese on pizza, it suggested adding an eighth of a cup of non-toxic glue. That’s a tip that originated from an 11-year-old comment on Reddit.
And in response to a query about daily rock intake for a person, it recommended we eat « at least one small rock per day. » That advice hailed from a 2021 story in The Onion.
Essentially, it’s a new variation on AI hallucinations, which occur when a generative AI model serves up false or misleading information and presents it as fact. Hallucinations result from flawed training data, algorithmic errors or misinterpretations of context.
The large language model behind AI engines like those from Google, Microsoft and OpenAI is « statistically predicting data it may see in the future based on what it has seen in the past, » said Mike Grehan, CEO of digital marketing agency Chelsea Digital. « So, there’s an element of ‘crap in, crap out’ that still exists. »
It’s a bad look for Google as it’s trying to get its footing in the shifting sands of the unfolding generative AI era.
The search engine that debuted in 1998 controls about 86% of the market. Google’s competitors don’t come close: Bing controls 8.2%, Yahoo has 2.6%, DuckDuckGo is 2.1%, Yandex has 0.2% and AOL is 0.1%.
But the advent of generative AI and its growth among consumers — adoption is projected to reach nearly 78 million users, or about one-quarter of the US population, by 2025 — arguably threatens Google’s stranglehold on the market, which translates to roughly 8.5 billion searches per day and $240 billion in annual advertising revenue.
Google has its own gen AI chatbot, Gemini, which is competing with the grandaddy of them all, ChatGPT, and a slew of others from Perplexity, Anthropic, Microsoft and more. They’re all fighting for relevancy as our access to information changes again, much like it did with the introduction of Google 26 years ago.
The last thing Google needs is to lose the trust of the millions of us doing Google searches.
In a statement, a Google spokesperson said the majority of AI Overviews provide accurate information with links for verification. Many of the examples popping up on social media are what she called « uncommon queries, » as well as « examples that were doctored or that we couldn’t reproduce.
