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 this, though, that’s what Google’s new AI Overviews feature will tell you to do. The feature, while not triggered for every query, scans the web and drums up an AI-generated response. The answer received for the pizza glue query appears to be based on a comment from a user named “fucksmith” in a more than decade-old Reddit thread, and they’re clearly joking.
This is just one of many mistakes cropping up in the new feature that Google rolled out broadly this month. It also claims that former US President James Madison graduated from the University of Wisconsin not once but 21 times, that a dog has played in the NBA, NFL, and NHL, and that Batman is a cop.
Google spokesperson Meghann Farnsworth said the mistakes came from “generally very uncommon queries, and aren’t representative of most people’s experiences.” The company has taken action against violations of its policies, she said, and are using these “isolated examples” to continue to refine the product.
I saw someone else mention this one on another post
Ah yes , the snake very famous for being a mammal 🤣 pic.twitter.com/xo538FcqoK— Raven – 🍉 (@RavenTenebris13) May 20, 2024
Look, Google didn’t promise this would be perfect, and it even slaps a “Generative AI is experimental” label at the bottom of the AI answers. But it’s clear these tools aren’t ready to accurately provide information at scale.
Take Google I/O’s big launch of this feature, for instance. The demo was highly controlled, and yet, it delivered a questionable answer about how to fix a jammed film camera. (It suggested they “open the back door and gently remove the film”; don’t do that unless you want to ruin your photos!)
It’s not just Google; companies like OpenAI, Meta, and Perplexity have all grappled with AI hallucinations and mistakes. However, Google is the first to deploy this technology on such a large scale, and the examples of flubs just keep rolling in.
Companies developing artificial intelligence are often quick to avoid taking accountability for their systems with an approach much like a parent with an unruly child — boys will be boys! These companies claim that they can’t predict what this AI will spit out, so really, it’s out of their control.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/23/24162896/google-ai-overview-hallucinations-glue-in-pizza
