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A Search Engine That Doesn’t Lie
And doesn’t guzzle energy, please. Do you know of one?
Google’s new AI Overview, recently rolled out in the United States, is saying that former U.S. president Barack Obama is a Muslim. Once again, for the record, he isn’t. It also recommends you pour glue onto pizza dough so the cheese doesn’t slide off.
More gossip: We hear it’s telling us that “the CIA has used black highlighters” and everyone “should eat at least one small rock a day.” It tells us we might have inferred from Edgar Allen Poe’s fictional story “The Casket [sic] of Amontillado” that people “spend almost 80% of their waking hours plotting revenge.” Supposedly, Google’s AI Overview absorbed these three bits of non-information from the satirical newspaper The Onion. Maybe that itself is an elaborate Onion-type joke…but why wouldn’t these AI Overviews be real? How can any currently available AI summarizer distinguish satire from fact?
“Hallucination” — that is, computers spitting out words that don’t describe reality — is, as Google CEO Sundar Pichai told the Verge, “still an unsolved problem. In some ways, it’s an inherent feature…LLMs aren’t necessarily the best approach to always get at factuality.”
At the same time, Google is claiming that concern is overblown. Who, they ask, would run these particular searches?
They’re underestimating the vast number of weird searches I’ve personally run.
Plus, it doesn’t make me feel better to know that a computer will lie to me only if I’m really asking for it. It feels like victim-blaming.
AI wastes energy and cooling water
Seriously, stop running these queries. The technology is energy-intensive. Google “wasted a bottle of water to tell you that terrible joke,” says Michael J. DeLuca.
If you use the Google search engine, you can turn off AI Overview.
This technology doesn’t work quite yet, and you and I shouldn’t have to fix it
Google is removing some of these falsehoods from AI Overview— manually, it seems, and only when individuals take the time to call them out. The technology can’t self-evaluate…
