AI search goes awry for Google

Last week, Google unveiled its biggest change to search in years, showcasing new artificial intelligence capabilities that answer people's questions in the company's attempt to catch up to rivals Microsoft and OpenAI.

The new technology has since generated a litany of untruths and errors -- including recommending glue as part of a pizza recipe and the ingesting of rocks for nutrients -- giving a black eye to Google and causing a furor online.

The incorrect answers in the feature called AI Overview have undermined trust in a search engine that more than 2 billion people turn to for authoritative information. And while other AI chatbots tell lies and act weird, the backlash demonstrated that Google is under more pressure to safely incorporate AI into its search engine.


The launch also extends a pattern of Google's having issues with its newest AI features immediately after rolling them out. In February 2023, when Google announced Bard, a chatbot to battle ChatGPT, it shared incorrect information about outer space. The company's market value subsequently dropped by $100 billion.

This past February, the company released Bard's successor, Gemini, a chatbot that could generate images and act as a voice-operated digital assistant. Users quickly realized that the system refused to generate images of white people in most instances and drew inaccurate depictions of historical figures.

With each mishap, tech industry insiders have criticized the company for dropping the ball. But in interviews, financial analysts said Google needed to move quickly to keep up with its rivals, even if it meant growing pains.

Google "doesn't have a choice right now," Thomas Monteiro, a Google analyst at Investing.com, said in an interview. "Companies need to move really fast, even if that includes skipping a few steps along the way. The user experience will just have to catch up."

Lara Levin, a Google spokesperson, said in a statement that the vast majority of AI Overview queries resulted in "high-quality information, with links to dig deeper on the web." The AI-generated result from the tool typically appears at the top of a results page.

"Many of the examples we've seen have been uncommon queries, and we've also seen examples that were doctored or that we couldn't reproduce," she added. The company will use "isolated examples" of problematic answers to refine its system.