There are a litany of reasons to distrust Google’s AI Overviews, which now appear at the top of its search results above links to actual websites.
The algorithmically generated answers, which pull from various sources online, have quickly become one of the biggest sources of misinformation on the entire internet. The search giant’s AI models are frequently caught hallucinating easily disproven facts, handing out dangerous “health” advice — and gutting the media industry by discouraging users from visiting publications’ sites.
Add to the list that it’s now furthering intensely harmful racial stereotypes. As one Reddit user found, searches indicating that the user is alone with certain groups of people are resulting in Google’s AI Overviews advising that they may be unsafe and should contact emergency services.
In our testing, the phenomenon is very real.
