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Google announced on Thursday that it will refine and redesign its AI-generated summaries of search results. blog posting explains why the function returns strange and inaccurate answers that include telling people to eat rocks or add glue to pizza sauce. The company will narrow down searches that will return an AI-written resume.
Google added several restrictions on the types of searches that would generate AI Overview results, said the company’s head of search Liz Reid, as well as “limiting the inclusion of satirical and humorous content.” The company is also cracking down on what it describes as a small number of AI reviews that violate its content policies, which it says occurred in fewer than 1 in 7 million unique searches where the feature appeared .
The AI Overviews feature, which Google rolled out in the US this month, quickly spawned viral examples of the tool misinterpreting information and appearing to use satirical sources like the Onion or joke Reddit posts to generate responses. Google’s AI failures have since become a meme, with fake screenshots of absurd and bleak answers being widely circulated on social media platforms alongside the tool’s real failures.
Google touted its AI Overviews feature as one of the pillars of the company’s broader push to incorporate generative artificial intelligence into its core services, but its rollout has seen the company again face public embarrassment after launching a new AI product. Google faced public backlash and ridicule earlier this year after its AI imaging tool mistakenly inserted people of color into non-historical situations, including creating images of black people as German World War II soldiers.
Google’s blog gave a brief summary of what went wrong with AI Overviews and defended it, with Reed arguing that many of the true falsehoods in AI Overviews were the result of gaps in information due to rare or unusual searches. Reid also claims that there were deliberate attempts to rig the feature so that it would give inaccurate answers.
“There’s nothing like having millions of people using the feature with tons of new searches,” Reed said in the post. “We also saw meaningless new searches seemingly aimed at producing the wrong results.”
Many of the viral posts were indeed from odd searches like “how many rocks should I eat” — which returned a result based on an Onion article titled Geologists recommend eating at least one small rock a day — but others seemed more reasonable requests. An AI expert share an image from an AI review claiming that Barack Obama was the first Muslim US president, a common right-wing conspiracy theory.
“From looking at examples from the last few weeks, we were able to identify patterns where we didn’t get it right, and we made more than a dozen technical improvements to our systems,” Reed said.
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Although Google’s blog outlines the problems with AI Overviews as mostly a series of edge cases, several artificial intelligence experts have commented that its problems are indicative of broader problems around AI’s ability to measure factual accuracy and problems around automating access to information.
Google claimed in its post that “user feedback shows” that people are more satisfied with their search results because of AI reviews, but the broader implications of its AI tools and changes to its search features are yet to be seen. are clear. Website owners are concerned that AI summaries will be disastrous for online media as they take traffic and advertising revenue away from sites, while some researchers worry that Google will consolidate even more control over what the public sees on the Internet.
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