Google’s A.I. Answers Said to Put Glue in Pizza, So Katie Notopoulos Made Some Pizza ⇥ businessinsider.com
Jason Koebler, 404 Media:
The complete destruction of Google Search via forced AI adoption and the carnage it is wreaking on the internet is deeply depressing, but there are bright spots. For example, as the prophecy foretold, we are learning exactly what Google is paying Reddit $60 million annually for. And that is to confidently serve its customers ideas like, to make cheese stick on a pizza, “you can also add about 1/8 cup of non-toxic glue” to pizza sauce, which comes directly from the mind of a Reddit user who calls themselves “Fucksmith” and posted about putting glue on pizza 11 years ago.
Katie Notopoulos, putting the “business” in Business Insider:
I knew my assignment: I had to make the Google glue pizza. (Don’t try this at home! I risked myself for the sake of the story, but you shouldn’t!)
My timeline on three entirely separate social networks — Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads — has been chock full of examples of Google’s A.I. answers absolutely eating dirt — or, in one case, rocks — in the face of obvious satire and shitposting. Well, obvious to us. Computers, it seems, have not figured out glue and gasoline are bad for food.
The A.I. answers from Google are not all yucks and chuckles, unfortunately.
Yesterday (Part 1) I saw that mushrooms post, and knew something like that was going to get people hurt. I didn’t really think that (CONTENT WARNING) asking how best to deal with depression was going to be next on the “shit I didn’t want to see” Bingo card.
The organizations know. They know that these tools are not ready. They call it a “beta” and feed it to you anyway.
Google is manually removing A.I. results where appropriate, and it is claiming some of the screenshots which have been circulating have been faked in some way without specifying which.
Given the sliding quality of Google’s results, it seems quite bold for the company to be confident users worldwide will trust its generated answers.
Quite bold, indeed.
I do not expect perfection, but it is downright embarrassing that Google rolled out a product so unreliable and occasionally dangerous it continues to tarnish a reputation already suffering. Google’s Featured Snippets were bad enough. Now it is in the process of rolling out a whole new level of overconfident nonsense to the entire world, fixing it as everyone tests its limits.