Google is scaling back its AI search plans after the summary feature told people to eat glue
Google is pulling back the use of AI-generated answers in search results after the feature made some infamous errors, including telling users to put glue in their pizza sauce.
Google launched AI Overviews, which put AI-generated summaries of search results on the top of the page for US users, two weeks ago. Over the last few days, users, including an SEO expert, noticed fewer AI overviews and suspected that the tech giant was taking them down a notch after criticisms. It is not possible to turn off the AI feature while using the search engine.
Google's head of search, Liz Reid, confirmed in a blog post on Thursday that the company is addressing some of these issues.
The changes come after recent examples of AI overviews going haywire — and faked pictures of the feature — flooded the internet. These included responses claiming Barack Obama was a Muslim president, that Africa has no countries beginning with the letter K, and that people should eat "at least one small rock per day."
Google's new guardrails include detecting "nonsensical queries" that shouldn't show AI results, limiting satire or humor content, and introducing restrictions for prompts where AI results would not be helpful because there is not enough data about that topic.
Google's own ads show that the erroneous summaries aren't limited to a few viral queries. In a demo video released two weeks ago, the Overview feature wrongfully advised the actor on how to fix their film camera.
Reid's blog post also said Google has limited content from forums or social media, which can have misleading advice.
"Forums are often a great source of authentic, first-hand information, but in some cases can lead to less-than-helpful advice, like using glue to get cheese to stick to pizza," Reid wrote in the post.
