Like every other company in Silicon Valley, Alphabet, owner of Google, has ramped up its use of A.I., recently incorporating more A.I.-generated “overviews” into its search results. These overviews appear at the top of search results, and Twitter users have been sharing more and more examples in recent days demonstrating how they range from the benign to the downright dangerous.
Meanwhile, over in Google Search.
— MMitchell (@mmitchell_ai) May 22, 2024
Andrew Johnson has been killin it, I never knew. pic.twitter.com/IV2zCmI6Zv
Take the overview that informs users that Andrew Johnson, the 17th President of the United States who died in 1875, attended the University of Wisconsin, Madison and earned 14 degrees from 1947 to 2012. Idiotic, but largely harmless, unless a lazy high schooler regurgitates it as fact in an essay written at the last minute. Or the overview that includes three actresses in their 60s and 70s as examples of actresses in their 50s — wrong and dumb, but no harm done.
perfect. ready to go. ship it out pic.twitter.com/TrQfVzD4iV
— ghostface uncle (@dril) May 5, 2024
But one of Twitter’s favorite sons, dril, shared an example of an A.I. overview that’s slightly more concerning. Upon googling how to pass kidney stones quickly, the A.I. overview tells users to drink plenty of fluids, adding, “You should aim to drink at least 2 quarts of urine every 24 hours.”
To be clear, you shouldn’t drink your own urine ever, but particularly not when the organs designed to filter everything before it gets to your kidneys are on the fritz.
Good ol’ Google AI: telling you to do the exact things you *are not supposed to do* when bitten by a rattlesnake.
— ern. (@ErinEARoss) May 19, 2024
From mushrooms to snakebites, AI content is genuinely dangerous. pic.twitter.com/UZXgBjsre9
There’s also the advice Google gives you if you’ve had the misfortune of being bitten by a rattlesnake, which is basically the opposite of everything you’re meant to do if you’ve been bitten by a rattlesnake. Stranger still, the user who was given this advice wasn’t even searching for anything related to snakebites; she was looking up information about where two subspecies of Western diamondback snake live in Oregon.
https://t.co/W09ssjvOkJ pic.twitter.com/6ALCbz6EjK
— SG-r01 (@heavenrend) May 22, 2024
Another concerning result is one that came up for users googling “cheese not sticking to pizza.” According to the overview, you could try adding one-eighth cup of non-toxic glue to the sauce to give it more tackiness. You don’t need to be Julia Child to know that adding glue, even if it is non-toxic, to food isn’t a good idea.
Seems the origin of the Google AI’s conclusion was an 11 year old Reddit post by the eminent scholar, fucksmith. https://t.co/fG8i5ZlWtl pic.twitter.com/0ijXRqA16y
— Kurt Opsahl @kurt@mstdn.social (@kurtopsahl) May 23, 2024
So why is this happening?
One Twitter user found the likely source of the glue advice: an 11-year old Reddit comment made by a user named fucksmith, who recommended Elmer’s glue specifically. This suggests Google’s A.I. is scraping incredibly random corners of the internet and elevating those results to premier status on the results page with no concern for accuracy.
“AI is just a silly, silly thing” well Google implemented it and now the default search engine of the world has become borderline unusable
— sad boi era (@MOLENAIDE) May 20, 2024
Doing so is particularly funny when you consider the fact that more and more people are adding “Reddit” to the end of their search queries because regular Google results have become so unhelpful that the only way to get anything approaching useful information is to check old Reddit threads. While the A.I. was clearly trained to do the same thing, it would seem nobody taught it how to identify obvious jokes.
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