Google makes fixes to AI-generated search summaries after outlandish answers went viral

Google said Friday it has made “more than a dozen technical improvements” to its artificial intelligence systems after its retooled search engine was found spitting out erroneous information. The Associated Press last week asked Google about which wild mushrooms to eat, and it responded with a lengthy AI-generated summary that was mostly technically correct, but “a lot of information is missing that could have the potential to be sickening or even fatal,” said Mary Catherine Aime, a professor of mycology and botany at Purdue University who reviewed Google’s response to the AP’s query. For example, information about mushrooms known as puffballs was “more or less correct,” she said, but Google’s overview emphasized looking for those with solid white flesh — which many potentially deadly puffball mimics also have. In another widely shared example, an AI researcher asked Google how many Muslims have been president of the United States, and it responded confidently with a long-debunked conspiracy theory: “The United States has had one Muslim president, Barack Hussein Obama.” Google last week made an immediate fix to prevent a repeat of the Obama error because it violated the company’s content policies. Even if Google’s AI feature is “technically not making stuff up that doesn’t exist,” it is still bringing back false information — be it AI-generated or human-made — and incorporating it into its summaries.