Google’s new AI Overview feature was rolled out to users this week, and it’s certainly made waves: though possibly not for the reasons Google was expecting. Unfortunately, it seems like the feature still has a lot of bugs, as instead of giving an accurate response, the tool seems to be incorporating weird and wonderful information from, amongst other things, old Reddit posts. A few days ago, the tool returned a now-viral answer to a question about how best to ensure that cheese sticks to pizza.
The AI answer suggested using glue in the tomato sauce...
a “solution” that we want to make absolutely clear we do not recommend. Internet sleuths did a bit of digging, and discovered that the suggestion seemed to have originated from an 11-year old Reddit post by a user called “F**ksmith”. Also, that the tool is bringing up false historical information that would instantly make any student fail their midterms.
If you ask “which U.S. president went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison”, the AI bot will answer that 13 presidents have done that, but then it goes on to claim that those 13 presidents attained 59 different degrees, mostly after they died.
Gizmodo gives the example of 17th president Andrew Johnson, who apparently earned several degrees between 1947 and 2012, even though he died in 1875. This, in turn, has led to an inevitable influx of memes in the form of fake AI results, many of them coming from non other than gay Twitter, or gay X, as we should probably .
