Uh Oh, Google’s New AI Overview is Giving Out Wrong Information

Remember when you could just search for the information you needed on the internet and be reasonably certain the internet would provide you with a useful answer? Google, has a new idea: What if there was a way to spend billions of dollars on a system that provides users with incorrect and or useless information?

If you’ve been using Google lately, you know that that future is already here. Twitter user @daltoneverett recently got a good look at the incredible capabilities of Googles new AI Overview tool when he entered “blinker not making sound” in Google’s search bar. In the past, he may have found ahelpful forum entry that helped him solve his problem. In the more recent past, he may have been given piles of SEO optimized websites that were somehow trying to get him signed up for something. But here in the future, Google’s hyper-intelligent learning computer can fall for an absolutely ancient car person joke because it’s less capable of understanding context than the average dog.

An actual search I made pic.twitter.com/6z2t4Jps37

— Iroquois Pliskin (@DaltonEverett_) May 19, 2024

If you’re not familiar, blinker fluid is a kind of tired in-joke among car people. Like, you’d tell someone, “did you check your blinker fluid?” and they, not really knowing a lot about cars would think, “I should go to the parts store and ask for blinker fluid.” You used to be able to go to the parts counter and ask for a radiator cap for a 1973 Beetle, people were having all kinds of fun back in those days, you see.

Anyway, it’ll be fun to contend with another useless technology that nobody asked for or wants for a period of a few months until tech stocks start to lag and every company announces that they’re going “all-in” on humanoid robots or whatever.

Image: iStock/ Google