Google's AI Overviews Tells Users to Eat Rocks Daily and Put Glue on Pizza
Source: sciencealert.com ↗
There aren't a lot of articles on the web about eating rocks as it is so self-evidently a bad idea. There is, however, a well-read satirical article from The Onion.
Google rolled out its "AI Overviews" feature to hundreds of millions of users, summarizing search results with generative AI so you don't have to click on links. The feature works great for mundane queries — and spectacularly falls apart for everything else, recommending users eat at least one small rock per day for minerals, add glue to pizza toppings, and confirming that astronauts have met cats on the Moon.
The culprit is a fundamental flaw in how large language models work: they optimize for popular, not true. Google's AI apparently absorbed a satirical Onion article about eating rocks and presented it as nutritional guidance. Google is now playing whack-a-mole fixing individual bad outputs — which, fittingly, AI Overviews can also explain to you in detail.