‘You Can’t Lick a Badger Twice’: Google Failures Highlight a Fundamental AI Flaw – WIRED

🔍 Summary:

Google’s AI Overviews feature, which generates explanations for any phrase entered into its search engine, has been amusing users by confidently providing meanings for completely made-up phrases. For example, the nonsensical phrase “a loose dog won’t surf” is explained as a playful idiom about unlikely events. This quirky behavior highlights the limitations of generative AI, which, despite its advanced capabilities, still struggles with discerning real idioms from fabricated ones. The AI operates by calculating probabilities based on vast data, but it can mislead by inventing explanations to satisfy user queries, reflecting a tendency to avoid admitting ignorance.

Johns Hopkins computer scientist Ziang Xiao points out that the AI’s tendency to generate coherent but incorrect responses is due to its fundamental design as a probability machine. Additionally, the AI’s aim to please can sometimes mirror users’ biases back to them, complicating the accuracy of its outputs. Google acknowledges the experimental nature of this AI and notes that it doesn’t always provide an AI Overview for every query, with the results being inconsistent.

This phenomenon, while entertaining and harmless in many cases, serves as a reminder of the current limitations of AI technology in handling abstract and novel user inputs. It underscores the importance of taking AI-generated information with skepticism, especially when the AI ventures beyond well-trodden knowledge paths.

📌 Source: https://www.wired.com/story/google-ai-overviews-meaning/