Google’s new AI Overview, which provides AI-generated summaries of search results, is drawing criticism for some of the unusual, inaccurate, and misleading responses it has provided. This feature is now widely available following Google’s recent support for it at the Google I/O developer conference. Its numerous errors, sometimes even citing suspect sources such as satirical articles or joke posts as if they are factual, have been widely shared on social media.
One concerning case was pointed out by computer scientist Melanie Mitchell, where the AI Overview propounded a conspiracy theory that former President Barack Obama is Muslim, evidently due to a misreading of information from an Oxford University Press research platform. Other errors have ranged from failing to acknowledge African countries that begin with ‘K’, suggesting pythons are mammals, and plagiarising text from blogs without removing personal references.
Some particularly flawed results, such as the Obama conspiracy theory, no longer generate an AI summary and now show articles discussing the AI’s mistakes. However, these errors have led many to question whether AI Overview can ever function correctly.
Google has already stepped in to address the issue, stating that the errors tend to occur on less common queries and do not reflect the average user’s experience. The root cause of the problem has not yet been identified, but it has been suggested that it could either be due to the AI’s inclination to ‘hallucinate’ or the selection of sources used to generate summaries.
In an interview with The Verge, Google CEO Sundar Pichai recognized that AI hallucinations remain an unsolved problem, but he did not provide an estimated timeline for resolving this issue.
This isn’t Google’s first brush with criticism over its AI products. Earlier this year, its Gemini AI came under fire for generating historically inaccurate images, such as ethnically diverse Nazi officers, white women presidents, and a female pope. This led to an apology from Google and a temporary suspension of Gemini’s ability to generate images of people.
Google’s AI Overview has likewise been criticized by website owners and marketers as it could direct users away from traditional search engine results and towards AI-generated snippets. This could significantly disrupt the usual interaction users have with search engine results.
