Recently, Google rolled out its AI search results for its users to try out. The aim was to offer users with an enhanced search experience. However, things turned south for the company when its AI provided users with bizarre results, like telling people to jump off a bridge if they felt depressed.
Google was swift to remove some inaccurate AI results, which it likes to call AI Overviews, but the damage was already done, sparking a meme fest. Now, in a blog post, the company’s head of search, Liz Reid, blamed “data voids” for the weird results, along with users making odd queries, and doubled down by claiming that AI results are leading to “higher satisfaction” with Search.
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Is Google’s AI Overview Hallucinating?
Reid said that AI Overviews don’t usually “hallucinate,” they just sometimes misinterpret what’s available on the internet. “There’s nothing quite like having millions of people using the feature with many novel searches,” she writes. “We’ve also seen nonsensical new searches, seemingly aimed at producing erroneous results.” She also noted that a “very large number of faked screenshots” of AI Overviews are being circulated.
Reid’s blog also talks about how the company is fixing AI Overviews by restricting when they appear for “nonsensical” queries and satire. The blog also compared AI Overviews to another Search feature dubbed featured snippets, which highlight information from a relevant webpage without using gen AI.
That said, the company’s introduction of AI Overviews has been yet another PR blunder. The company is fighting for the top spot against OpenAI and AI search startups like Perplexity, which is said to be worth $3 billion. If Google wants to take on these firms, it will have to move fast. But it would also be required to maintain user trust.
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CEO Sundar Pichai talks About AI Gaining Consciousness
YouTuber Hayls World recently interviewed Sundar Pichai and touched upon several topics related to AI. During the interview, Pichai revealed some intriguing information about Google’s vision and approach towards AI.
Pichai talked about the ongoing advancements and Google’s commitment to AI development. After all, the CEO of Google surely knows a lot more about the future of AI, considering his position and involvement in leading AI research.
While talking about the pros of Goolge’s AI, Pichai said that there are several use cases. He talked about summarizing content, saving time with the help of artificial intelligence, and much more. They also discussed how the Gemini model fares against ChatGPT. Pichai said that Google has an ecosystem that can integrated easily with various products. He further said:
“For example, it can summarize emails in Gmail and you can send emails easily. It integrates very well with other Google products including YouTube. It is multimodal, and over time you will be able to use voice to operate AI."