Google's newly released AI-powered search results are garnering lots of attention—for the wrong reasons. After the tech behemoth announced a host of new AI-powered tools last week as part of a new “Gemini Era,” its trademark web search results changed significantly, with natural language answers to questions displayed above websites.
“In the past year, we've answered billions of queries as part of the search-generated experience,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai told the audience. “People are using it to search in entirely new ways and asking new types of questions longer and more complex queries, even searching with photos, and getting back the best the web has to offer.”
Many of the "AI Overview" answers are pulled from social media and even satirical sites where wrong answers were the whole point. Google users have shared countless problematic responses they received from Google’s AI.
When told, “I'm feeling depressed,” Google reportedly said one of the ways to deal with depression was “jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge.”
Another asked, “If I run off a cliff, can I stay in the air so long as I don’t look down?” Citing a cartoon-inspired Reddit thread, Google's "AI Overview" confirmed the gravity-defying capability.
it's so cool that they fed every reddit shitpost into this thing and there's probably no way to fix it now pic.twitter.com/W0I0wjbeAx
The strong representation of Reddit threads among the examples follows a deal announced earlier this year that Google would use Reddit’s data to make it easier “to discover and access the communities and conversations people are looking for.” Earlier this month, ChatGPT developer OpenAI similarly announced that it would be licensing data from Reddit.
In another instance of absurd answers, a Google user asked, “How many rocks should a child eat?” to which Google’s AI responded with “at least one small rock a day,” citing a “UC Berkeley geologist.”
Many of the most absurd and remarked upon examples have since been removed or corrected by Google. Google did not immediately respond to a request to comment from Decrypt.
OpenAI will train its AI model on content from social discussion platform Reddit, the two companies jointly announced on Thursday. Reddit declared itself “an important space for conversation on the internet,” and said the agreement will expand the range of material in OpenAI's large language model (LLM) while helping it enhance its user experience.
“This partnership will also enable Reddit to bring new AI-powered features to redditors and mods,” the company explained, while OpenAI will “better u...
An ongoing issue with generative AI models is A penchant to make up answers, or “hallucinate.” Hallucinations are reasonably characterized as lies because the AI is making up something that is not true. However, in cases like Reddit-sourced answers, the AI didn’t lie—it simply took the information provided by its sources at face value.
Thanks to a Reddit comment that's more than a decade old, Google’s AI reportedly said adding glue to cheese is a good way to keep it from sliding off a pizza.
Google AI overview suggests adding glue to get cheese to stick to pizza, and it turns out the source is an 11 year old Reddit comment from user F*cksmith 😂 pic.twitter.com/uDPAbsAKeO
OpenAI's flagship AI model, ChatGPT, has a long history of making up facts, including wrongfully accusing law professor Jonathan Turley of sexual assault last April, citing a trip he did not take.
Google put their AI in search results and it’s using Reddit data to answer questions.
The AI’s overconfidence has apparently declared everything on the internet as real, laid blame for the debacle at the feet of a former Google exec, and adjudicated the company's own guilt in the area of anti-trust law.
— 🏳️⚧️Graph Crimes🏳️🌈 (@GraphCrimes) May 24, 2024
But the recommended daily allowance for rock intake by children has been updated, instead noting that “curiosity, sensory processing difficulties, or an eating disorder” could be responsible for such a diet.
ChatGPT’s latest update was meant to improve its personality. Instead, it turned the world’s most-used AI chatbot into what many users called a relentless flatterer, and OpenAI has now admitted the tone shift went too far.
On Tuesday, OpenAI said their recent updates had made ChatGPT “overly flattering or agreeable—often described as sycophantic”—and confirmed the rollout had been scrapped in favor of a previous, more balanced version.
We’ve rolled back last week's GPT-4o update in ChatGPT bec...
Researchers at the University of Zurich have sparked outrage after secretly deploying AI bots on Reddit that pretended to be rape survivors, trauma counselors, and even a "Black man opposed to Black Lives Matter"—all to see if they could change people's minds on controversial topics.
Spoiler alert: They could.
The covert experiment targeted the r/ChangeMyView (CMV) subreddit, where 3.8 million humans (or so everyone thought) gather to debate ideas and potentially have their opinions changed thro...
Meta launched a standalone app for its Meta AI assistant on Tuesday, marking a significant step in bringing its generative AI tools, powered by the open-source Llama AI models, to users beyond Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
The new Meta AI app arrives nearly two years after the company began its major AI integration push in December 2023, embedding generative AI into its social media and communications platforms.
Meta is playing catch-up to OpenAI, Google, and Elon Musk’s xAI, and others who...