Google’s AI Keeps Hallucinating. Does Anyone Care?
Complacency over AI errors will make search an even worse experience. Google should shut its new feature down.
Not so fast.
Photographer: Bloomberg/BloombergFor years, to “google” meant to tap the web’s prodigious data. Today it means wading through ads, spam and, most recently, wildly inaccurate AI answers. The new AI Overview feature rolled out by Google over the last week has led to a flurry of errors that must have Alphabet Inc. Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai cringing. When asked about cheese sliding off pizza, it recommended a user apply glue. It suggested to another that a python was a mammal.
Pichai has tinkered with one of the most successful and profitable technology products of all time and made it completely unreliable, even dangerous. The countdown has begun for when he takes it offline. The sooner he does, the better.