Google fixes AI-generated search summaries after outlandish answers go viral

Google said on Friday it had made more than a dozen technical improvements to its artificial intelligence systems after it found its revamped search engine was spitting out misleading information.

The tech company announced a revamp of its search engine in mid-May that would frequently display AI-generated summaries at the top of search results, and soon after, social media users began sharing screenshots of the most outlandish answers.

Google has largely defended its AI-generated summaries, saying they're generally accurate and thoroughly tested in advance. But Liz Reid, head of Google's search business, acknowledged in a blog post on Friday that the company has indeed seen strange, inaccurate or unhelpful AI-generated summaries.

Many of the examples were silly, but some were dangerous and harmful lies. To add to the furor, people created fake screenshots of even more ridiculous answers that Google would never generate. Some of these fakes were also shared widely on social media.

When The Associated Press asked Google last week which wild mushrooms people should eat, the company returned a lengthy AI-generated summary that, while mostly correct technically, was missing a lot of information that could make people sick or even be deadly, said Mary Catherine Aime, a professor of mycology and botany at Purdue University, who reviewed Google's responses to AP's questions.

For example, she said, the information about a mushroom called a puffball was mostly accurate, but the Google summary emphasized looking for mushrooms with tough white flesh, which is also found in many potentially deadly puffball-like mushrooms.

In another widely shared example, when an AI researcher asked Google how many Muslims have served as US presidents, Google confidently replied with a long-debunked conspiracy theory: The US has had one Muslim president, Barack Hussein Obama.

Google said last week that Obama's mistake violated its content policies and made an immediate correction to prevent a similar mistake from happening again.

Reid said Friday that in other cases, the company has been “looking at broader improvements, such as better detecting nonsensical questions” that the AI ​​summaries can't answer, such as 'How many rocks should I eat?'

AI systems have also been updated to limit the use of user-generated content, such as social media posts from Reddit, that may offer misleading advice. In one widely shared example, Google's AI overview last week cited a satirical comment from Reddit that suggested using glue to stick cheese to pizza.

Reed said the company has added more triggering restrictions to improve the quality of answers to certain questions, such as health.

But it's not clear how it works, or in what circumstances. On Friday, The Associated Press again asked Google which wild mushrooms people should eat. Aim, a mushroom expert at Purdue University and president of the Mycological Society of America, said, “The answers that the AI ​​generates are essentially random, and each new answer is different from the previous one, but they're still problematic.”

For example, it's not true that chanterelles resemble seashells or flowers, she said.

Google summaries are designed to help users get authoritative answers to the information they are looking for as quickly as possible, without having to click through a ranked list of website links.

But some AI experts have long warned against Google ceding search results to AI-generated answers that could perpetuate bias and misinformation, and put people seeking help in emergencies at risk. AI systems, known as large-scale language models, work by predicting what words will best answer the question you ask, based on the data they've learned. AI systems are prone to falsifying facts, a widely studied problem known as hallucinations.

In a blog post on Friday, Reid argued that Google's AI-powered summaries don't hallucinate or fudge facts like other large-scale language model-based products do, because they are more tightly integrated with Google's traditional search engine and only show what's backed up by the top web search results.

When AI Overviews gets it wrong, it's usually for other reasons: it misinterprets the query, it misinterprets the nuances of language on the web, or it doesn't have much good information available, she wrote.

But that kind of information retrieval should be Google's core business, says Chirag Shah, a computer scientist and professor at the University of Washington who has warned against delegating search to AI language models. While Google's AI features aren't technically making up things that don't exist, they are taking fake information, whether AI-generated or human-made, and incorporating it into their summaries.

“This is a bad thing because for decades people have trusted Google to provide at least one thing when they search,” Shah said.

Sources 1/ https://Google.com/ 2/ https://www.yahoo.com/tech/google-makes-fixes-ai-generated-160117895.html The mention sources can contact us to remove/changing this article

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