How many stones should you eat per day? Toddlers learn fairly quickly that the answer is zero, perhaps from experience, perhaps after being scolded by a parent. But ask the world's largest search engine, and you might get a different answer.
“You should eat at least one small rock a day, according to geologists at the University of California, Berkeley,” Google confidently responded to some users on last week. when asked.
“They say the stones are a vital source of vitamins and minerals that are important for digestive health.”
This case was not an isolated incident. Last week, Google also told search engine users that Barack Obama was America's first Muslim president. When asked to name foods that end in “hmm,” he replied, “Applum, banana, strawberry, tomato and coconut.”
Google wasn't hacked, but the real explanation was potentially more troubling. The internet giant has launched a new artificial intelligence (AI) answering feature that it hopes will be the future of its search engine.
Google recently announced that it will begin adding “AI Reviews” to the billions of searches performed every day. While a company might once link to multiple websites that could answer a query, it will instead use AI to summarize authoritative sources and provide a simple answer.
The feature has been widely introduced to users in the US and is expected to launch globally by the end of the year. But it all started badly. Over the weekend, users shared examples of incorrect answers, including putting glue on a pizza so the cheese would stick to the base.
Google insists that these cases are not typical for the tool. “The vast majority of AI reviews provide high-quality information with links for deeper web searches,” the spokesperson said. “Many of the examples we saw were unusual queries, but we also saw examples that were spoofed or that we couldn't reproduce.”
Engineers have spent recent days manually modifying queries that have gone viral on the Internet. The company said it has extensively tested the feature in recent months and draws on decades of experience building the world's most popular search engine.