Search hallucinates, network laughs
Google’s AI makes Obama a Muslim president
24.05.2024, 08:34
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Please use glue to attach cheese to the pizza, but only non-toxic glue. And the USA has already had a Muslim president. Google is making mistakes like this in its new AI surveys in the USA. The software does not seem to know a crucial difference.
Since Google has added AI overviews to its search engine in the USA, embarrassing and even disturbing errors in the software have been making the rounds on the Internet. For example, one user published the recommendation to How to attach cheese to a pizza with non-toxic glueIn other cases, according to screenshots, the search engine claimed in the AI responses that dogs had played in the NBA basketball league and the NFL football league and that Barack Obama was the first Muslim president of the USA.
The summaries created using artificial intelligence – called “AI Overviews” in the USA – are intended to give users a direct answer to their questions more quickly, instead of presenting them with a list of web links. Several startups want to use AI answers to challenge Google’s dominance in web searches. But the Internet group is also moving in this direction itself. The search engine has long had short answers to factual questions above the links. But now some of them are texts with several paragraphs.
The function is to be introduced in other countries by the end of the year. Many website operators and media are worried that Google will direct fewer people to them as a result of the AI summaries and that their business will suffer as a result. Google counters that there is actually more traffic to the sources of information that end up in the overviews. How the rest of them are doing, however, remains unclear.
Non-white Nazi soldiers and settlers
However, the widespread introduction of the function revealed a completely different problem: in many cases, the AI software does not seem to be able to distinguish serious information from jokes or satire. The sources for some particularly silly claims were found to be joke posts on online platforms or articles from the satirical website “The Onion” – such as the claim that geologists recommend eating a small stone a day.
A Google spokeswoman told the technology blog “The Verge” that the errors “generally resulted from very unusual requests and did not reflect what most people experience.” These “isolated examples” were used to improve the product.
In February, Google had to endure online ridicule for an AI program. The Gemini software generated images of non-white Nazi soldiers and non-white American settlers. Google explained that it had failed to program exceptions for cases in which diversity was definitely out of place. After that, the company stopped allowing Gemini to generate images of people for the time being.