Google on Thursday addressed some of the truly bizarre results that users of its new artificial intelligence-powered search feature received recently which included advice to eat rocks and glue cheese to pizzas.
After the rollout of its “AI Overviews” tool in the U.S. earlier in May, social media was flooded with viral posts appearing to show wild results that it was spewing out. In a blog post, the company insisted that some of the seemingly damning posts were “obvious and silly” fakes, but others were real “odd and erroneous” answers that Overviews had given.
Liz Reid, Google’s head of search, wrote in the blog post that the strange results “highlighted some specific areas that we needed to improve.” Among those areas, she wrote, was how the tool deals with “nonsensical queries and satirical content.”
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One of the queries that received media attention concerned how many rocks human beings should eat, with AI Overviews responding: “Eating the right rocks can be good for you because they contain minerals that are important for your body’s health.”
Reid said the baffling result occurred because, unsurprisingly, there “isn’t much web content that seriously contemplates that question.” “However, in this case, there is satirical content on this topic… that also happened to be republished on a geological software provider’s website,” Reid wrote, referring to a site which had carried a link to an article from The Onion headlined: “Geologists Recommend Eating At Least One Small Rock Per Day.”
“In other examples, we saw AI Overviews that featured sarcastic or troll-y content from discussion forums,” Reid continued. “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.”
The comment referred to an answer the feature gave to a user who wanted to know how to stop cheese sliding off their pizza. “Add some glue,” AI Overviews suggested. “Mix about 1/8 cup of Elmer’s glue in with the sauce. Non-toxic glue will work.” The answer appeared to have come from a Reddit user named “fucksmith” who jokingly gave the glue advice in a thread on the site 11 years ago.
Reid said Google has made “more than a dozen technical improvements to our systems” to address the situation, including limiting the amount of “user-generated content in responses” as well as restricting the “inclusion of satire and humor content.”
