Google, the search engine that once declared it would do no evil, has been rather enthusiastically flirting with chaos thanks to its new AI Overviews feature. This sparkling addition to its search results has managed to commit the digital equivalent of recommending people add glue to pizza—except in Google’s case, it actually recommended glue on pizza. Oh, and a side of stones. For calcium, presumably.
AI Overviews, formerly known as the “Search Generative Experience” until it was rebranded with the subtlety of a magician pulling a rabbit out of a blender, is meant to provide helpful Wikipedia-meets-Oracle-of-Delphi snippets that summarize answers from across the web. Instead, some responses have included dietary suggestions better suited to goats or robots with digestion troubleshooters on speed dial.
The internet reacted as it usually does when served a corporate product that is both undercooked and overconfident—screenshots, sarcasm, and a sense that Skynet will not need to fight hard for control. Among the less digestible advice were recommendations to eat rocks, use toxic glue on pizza to help the cheese stick, and the perhaps-least-surprising suggestion to consume a minimum of one small rock per day to strengthen bones. Sadly, these were not the brainchildren of Google’s top minds, but rather the result of the AI ingesting and regurgitating Reddit posts that were, to use the medical term, clearly jokes.
The problem, as even Google admits, is that AI Overviews sometimes cannot tell irony from dietary advice. Liz Reid, Google’s head of search and person probably having the world’s least enviable week, explained that the rock guidance came from a “10-year-old Reddit post” that was anything but serious. She added that the glue-on-pizza tip was also pulled from social media and that while AI Overviews does attempt to prioritize high-quality, trustworthy information, sometimes the spaghetti code hits the fan.
Google insists it has already made several technical improvements to reduce these types of “hallucinations” which is, rather poetically, what the industry calls it when an AI confidently spits out nonsense. The company remains committed to what it calls a “high bar for information quality” even as that bar appears to have been left somewhere near a particularly sarcastic subreddit.
As the AI-fueled arms race among tech giants rages on like teenagers cramming for finals with Wikipedia footnotes and too much caffeine, one can only hope that search engines remember that some content on the internet is written by people aiming for laughs, not facts.
After all, adding glue to pizza is a sticky situation in more ways than one.