You know how Google’s new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won’t slide off (pssst…please don’t do this.)
Well, according to an interview at The Vergewith 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.”
I swear I’m not just trying to start an argument, but I don’t see the disagreement here. You’re saying people here are too negative, but people aren’t shitting on the idea of LLMs, but the over promising of what they can do. You’re tired of explaining that it’s not true AI, but the confusion of caused by Google calling it “AI Overviews.”
You say it’s nothing new and that we’ve always had to vet sources when Google sends us somewhere, which is true, but the Overviews aren’t sending people anywhere, they’re summarizing and trying to give you an answer. They do link to sources for now, but the end goal is clearly that we trust the summary without following the links.
People who are listening to and parsing his comments are not the same people who will be blindly consuming these “AI Overviews.” It’s a problem.