Google’s recently launched AI Overview feature, designed to provide users with AI-generated summaries of search results, has faced criticism for delivering misleading, inaccurate, and sometimes bizarre responses. The feature, now being rolled out to billions of users following Google’s strong emphasis on it at the recent Google I/O developer conference, has become a subject of widespread ridicule and concern on social media as users share examples of the AI’s mistakes.
It was only a matter of time before human curiosity surpassed the guardrails of AI overview in one way or another.
Both journalists and everyday users have taken to various platforms, including X, to highlight instances where the AI Overview feature has cited questionable sources, such as satirical articles from The Onion or joke posts on Reddit, as if they were factual.
In one particularly alarming case, computer scientist Melanie Mitchell demonstrated an example where the feature displayed a conspiracy theory suggesting that former President Barack Obama is Muslim. This appeared to be a result of the AI misinterpreting information from an Oxford University Press research platform.
Other examples of the AI’s errors include plagiarizing text from blogs without removing personal references to the authors’ children, failing to acknowledge the existence of African countries starting with the letter “K,” and even suggesting that pythons are mammals.
Some of these inaccurate results, like the Obama conspiracy theory or the suggestion to put glue on pizza, no longer display an AI summary. Instead, they now show articles referencing the AI’s factual shortcomings.
However, people are now questioning whether AI Overview can ever fulfill its intended purpose accurately.
Google has already acknowledged the issue, with a company spokesperson informing The Verge that these mistakes occurred on “generally very uncommon queries and aren’t representative of most people’s experiences.”
Nevertheless, the exact cause of the problem remains unclear. It could be attributed to the AI’s tendency to “hallucinate.”
During an interview with The Verge, Google CEO Sundar Pichai discussed the challenge of AI hallucinations, recognizing them as an “unsolved issue” without committing to a specific timeframe for resolution.
Google has previously faced backlash for its AI technologies, with Gemini AI drawing criticism earlier this year for producing historically inaccurate images, such as racially diverse Nazi officers, female presidents, and a woman pope. Following the controversy, Google issued a public apology and temporarily disabled Gemini’s ability to generate images of individuals.
Furthermore, AI Overview has come under scrutiny from website owners and the marketing community for potentially diverting users from traditional search engine results to relying solely on AI-generated summaries.
