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Why Google’s AI Overviews gets things wrong

MIT Technology Review: “When Google announced it was rolling out its artificial intelligence-powered search feature earlier this month, the company promised that “Google will do the googling for you.” The new feature, called AI Overviews, provides Search users with AI-generated snapshots highlighting key information and links to help you find what you’re searching for faster and more easily in brief summaries on top of search results.  Unfortunately, AI systems are inherently unreliable. Within days of AI Overviews being released in the US, users quickly shared examples of the feature suggesting that its users add glue to pizza, eat at least one small rock a day, and that former US president Andrew Johnson earned university degrees between 1947 and 2012, despite dying in 1875.  On Thursday, Liz Reid, head of Google Search, announced that the company has been making technical improvements to the system to make them less likely to generate incorrect answers to users’ queries, including better detection mechanisms for nonsensical queries, and limiting the inclusion of satire and humor content and user-generated content in responses that could offer misleading advice. But why is AI Overviews returning unreliable, potentially dangerous information? And what, if anything, can be done to fix it?..”

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