Google cancels AI search feature after errors and flaws

When Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai introduced a generative artificial intelligence feature for the company’s search engine last month, he and his colleagues demonstrated the new capability with six text queries that the public could try.

Questions included “how to clean a fabric sofa” and “what should I use to remove a coffee stain from my carpet.” These aimed to highlight how Google’s new feature, AI Overviews, could generate comprehensive and useful summaries of information on top of traditional search results.

But on Friday, according to New York Times tests, only one of the six queries still provided insight into the AI. Instead, this feature was significantly less prevalent. Searching for “what should I use to remove a coffee stain from my carpet” now resulted in a snippet of text from a website, JDog Carpet Cleaning & Floor Care, while “how to clean a fabric sofa” was replaced with a link to the HGTV website with the answer. (Search results may vary by user and location.)

The disappearance of AI previews for some searches appears to be part of a broader rollback after the new technology produced a litany of truths and errors, including recommending glue as part of a pizza recipe and suggesting people ingest rocks for nutrients. Users complained loudly about the errors on social media, in many cases mocking Google.

Liz Reid, who was recently promoted to head of search at Google, wrote in a blog post By Thursday, the company had scaled back AI previews in some ways, rolling out “additional trigger enhancements” to offer more cautious health responses, disabling misleading advice, and limiting the inclusion of AI. satire and responses from users on forums like Reddit.

“We will continue to improve when and how we display AI previews and strengthen our protections,” she wrote, adding that Google was working on updates to improve a wide range of AI results. research.

Ashley Thompson, a Google spokeswoman, said in a statement Friday that the company has made more than a dozen technical updates to its systems.

“AI previews today help users answer a large number of search queries, serving as a starting point to content across the web. » The company added that while it is making adjustments to improve AI previews, it is not retreating from this feature in the long term.

The backtracking dealt a blow to Google’s efforts to keep pace with rivals Microsoft and OpenAI, maker of chatbot ChatGPT, in the frenzied race to lead AI. It also highlighted the difficult strategic choice Google faces over whether to adopt AI technology that could be unreliable or retain its wildly popular search engine – and risk taking a hit. lagging behind its peers.

Google had chosen to move more slowly than Microsoft, which integrated more conversational AI into its Bing search engine early last year. Google, which has significantly more users than Bing, tested AI features for its search engine a year before introducing AI previews. The company said the new feature will roll out immediately to users in the United States and to more than 1 billion people by the end of the year.

But ultimately, Google “should have rolled this out more slowly,” said Patrick Hall, assistant professor of decision sciences at the George Washington University School of Business. “Once something like that happens, you really have to retire. And at the very least, it damages the company’s reputation.

Google, which has led internet search for more than two decades, has struggled since OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022. Some tech industry insiders viewed the chatbot’s ability to generate responses as a serious threat to the Google search engine, which has been the most popular way. for information online.

Since then, Google has worked aggressively to regain its edge in AI, launching a family of technologies called Gemini, including new AI models for developers. The company has also integrated this technology into YouTube, Gmail and Docs, helping users create videos, emails and drafts with less effort.

Last month, Ms. Reid said at Google’s developer conference that the search engine would perform more searches on Google for users with AI previews. She highlighted the increasingly complex demands that Google could meet with this feature, but these features have not yet been released to users.

On stage, simpler questions like “How do I get the smell of a campfire out of my clothes” gave the AI ​​answers including airing out, adding baking soda, and spraying juice lemon.

But when users got their hands on the new service, they found that the AI ​​previews sometimes generated incorrect — or downright dangerous — responses, including recommending putting non-toxic glue on the pizza so that the cheese sticks. He also misunderstood some websites he cited and got presidential history wrong.

Of the six questions Google threw at the public, the only one that consistently triggered an AI preview on Friday was “what are some cool science projects I can do with my 12-year-old son.”

The answer? Grow crystals, extract DNA from saliva and write a message with invisible ink.

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