If its job is to write a fan fic on what may or may not be true on what you asked for, then it does a great job. But typically people search for information, and getting what is essentially a glorified auto complete isn't useful. It's like big tech has learned nothing about the massive issue of disinformation and just added fuel to the fire to an unsolved problem we're still very much trying to figure out.

The problem with all these chat AIs is that they're just a gloried autocorrect. It never knew what it was saying from the beginning. That's why it "hallucinates".

This is the best summary I could come up with:

You know how Google's new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries?

Well, according to an interview at The Verge with Google CEO Sundar Pichai published earlier this week, just before criticism of the outputs really took off, these "hallucinations" are an "inherent feature" of  AI large language models (LLM), which is what drives AI Overviews, and this feature "is still an unsolved problem."

So expect more of these weird and incredibly wrong snafus from AI Overviews despite efforts by Google engineers to fix them, such as this big whopper: 13 American presidents graduated from University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Despite Pichai's optimism about AI Overviews and its usefulness, the errors have caused an uproar online, with many observers showing off various instances of incorrect information being generated by the feature.

And it's staining the already soiled reputation of Google's flagship product, Search, which has already been dinged for giving users trash results.

"Google’s playing a risky game competing against Perplexity & OpenAI, when they could be developing AI for bigger, more valuable use cases beyond Search."

The original article contains 344 words, the summary contains 183 words. Saved 47%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

The greatest scapegoat ever created. AI did it not us, oh no!