Alerted to certain strange and even dangerous results, Google modifies its search engine Overviews

Google has taken steps to evolve its new AI Overviews search engine, powered by generative artificial intelligence (AI), after people reported strange or potentially dangerous answers. The group told AFP on Friday that it had “acted quickly when justified by our content regulations”.

Blogger Dare Obasanjo notably showed that when asked about the number of Muslim presidents the United States had had, AI Overviews responded that Barack Obama was “considered by some to be the first Muslim president”. Referring to this example, a Google spokesperson explained that this result “violated our policies and we removed it”.

Unusual and dangerous answers

Another Internet user, via his account called PixelButts on X (ex-Twitter), posted a screenshot presenting the response to the request “cheese not sticking to pizza”. AI Overviews suggests, in addition to mixing the cheese with the sauce, adding glue “nontoxic” with cheese to make it stickier. Freelance journalist Kristi Hines claimed on X that this response was inspired by a comment posted on the social network Reddit more than a decade ago.

The new boss of the satirical site The Onion highlighted the link between certain responses and humorous content posted online on his platform. Among the examples, AI Overview claims that the CIA officially admitted to using black highlighters. The search engine misuses a satirical article from The Onion, according to which the illegible passages in the agency’s documents are the result of an error and not of a desire to hide certain content.

Google “uses these examples to develop improvements to our system, some of which have already been implemented”, commented the spokesperson. In mid-May, Google presented AI Overviews, which offers written text in response to a search and no longer just links to sites, as was the case until now. The links have not disappeared, but are relegated below the text, the content of which alone is likely to satisfy the curiosity of users.