Do you remember when the Pixel 6’s fingerprint scanner was on the fritz, and Google basically blamed users for not using it properly? Well, it looks like the company is doing it again with its new AI Overviews. Google is defending AI Overview’s weird responses, and putting some of the blame on the people.
To catch you up on the drama, Google launched AI Overviews during Google I/O, and it’s been a turbulent affair ever since. Soon after the launch, we’ve been seeing numerous reports pointing to the tool giving some wild and outlandish answers to queries. Several of them were actually doctored to make them seem accurate. One example is the one where the tool said that cockroaches could safely live inside of a human male.
However, some popular examples of the tool’s blunders are the one where it told people that they should eat rocks and the one telling people to put Elmer’s Glue on their pizza. While anyone with more than one brain cell would know that that’s not good advice to follow, this just means that it’s possible for it to mess up and give advice that’s not so obviously dangerous.
Google is defending AI Overview’s weird answers
Google recently posted a lengthy blog post about the recent events. As you can expect, the post highlighted the positive attributes of AI Overviews while diverting blame away from the company’s practices. The post talked about the odd queries that people input. We have to admit that many of the weird results came from rather unconventional queries.
The post also mentioned that the AI overviews don’t generate answers in the same way as chatbots. When someone puts in a query, the models scour the internet to find relevant websites with the information. It then relays the information to the user. So, some of the odd answers came from a “data void” where there wasn’t much information to gather. So, Gemini hallucinated.
Be that as it may, Google still needs to take accountability for the answers in some way, shape, or form. Some of its AI products were rushed and half-baked when they hit the market. It’s starting to become a trend of rushing a product onto the scene and fixing it in post after making numerous apologies about it. Hopefully, the company can fix its practices.
2024-06-01 15:07:39