Google's new AI search feature has been recommending people drink urine ('light in color')

SoftwareAIGoogle’s new AI search feature has been recommending people drink urine (‘light in color’)When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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Google headquarters is seen in Mountain View, California, United States on September 26, 2022.

Google’s revolutionising the search engine game using AI… obviously. And that means it’s giving out worse advice than you’ll find a president espousing during a global pandemic. Okay, it wasn’t suggesting you inject bleach, but just prior to a full launch as Google’s new AI Overviews feature it was recommending users drink a couple of litres of specifically light-coloured urine.

This was during its initial Lab testing phase, where it was called the Search Generative Experience (SGE), but it was stillrecommending the drinking of urineas an effective method for quickly passing kidney stones a week or so before Google announced it was rolling the feature out across the US.

Now called AI Overviews, the feature—which essentially seems to be replacing Featured Snippets at the top of a Google search page—is kicking off in the US first, with other territories “coming soon.”

Even apart from the dodgy AI-driven advice, we’re not really here for it. To us it really looks likeGoogle is intent on breaking the internetit helped create, and not for the benefit of anyone apart from itself. But because it is based on current generative AI technology, with all its flaws, you are going to get more erroneous advice than you would if it was just serving up different pages with actual authority and expertise for you to go check out yourself.

Instead, it’s doing the classic AI thing of presenting completely incorrect information as factually accurate with complete confidence in its fuzzy thinking. As one user states looking for ways to disable these overviews:“I’m more than capable of misinterpreting internet articles on my own.”

Google has learned some things in its Lab phase, however, and our own experts have seen it generating fewer AI Overviews than in testing, and it’s more readily citing its sources, too. It’s also gotten smaller than it was in earlier iterations, so it’s not taking up as much search page real estate.

perfect. ready to go. ship it out pic.twitter.com/TrQfVzD4iVMay 5, 2024

But still, with its focus on so-called ‘how to’ content, AI’s propensity to confidently dish out the wrong information isn’t great. And I’d expect to see more weird, hilarious, or even worrying recommendations from AI Overviews as Google attempts to sharpen up its search experience.

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Now it’s no longer an opt-in service and is going to just be part of Google whether we want it or not, how do we avoid getting the bad AI advice? Sadly there’s no standard way to just disable AI Overviews specifically, but there are workarounds.Bleeping Computerhas noted a way to force Google to always just show you web search results without any generative AI shenanigans getting involved, andTom’s Hardwarehas gone into detail, too.

(Image credit: Future)

Editing Google Web site search into the Chrome browser

There are also Chrome extensions you can install from theChrome Web Store, with four different options available at the moment. The Hide Google AI Overviews one at least still allows for snippets to be presented, so isn’t quite the kill switch the manual method is.

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