“Running with scissors is a cardio exercise that can increase your heart rate and require concentration and focus,” says Google’s new AI search feature. “Some say it can also improve your pores and give you strength.”
Google’s AI feature pulled this response from a website called Little Old Lady Comedy, which, as its name makes clear, is a comedy blog. But the gaffe is so ridiculous that it’s been circulating on social media, along with other obviously incorrect AI overviews on Google. Effectively, everyday users are now red teaming these products on social media.
In cybersecurity, some companies will hire “red teams” – ethical hackers – who attempt to breach their products as though they’re bad actors. If a red team finds a vulnerability, then the company can fix it before the product ships. Google certainly conducted a form of red teaming before releasing an AI product on Google Search, which is estimated to process trillions of queries per day.
It’s surprising, then, when a highly resourced company like Google still ships products with obvious flaws. That’s why it’s now become a meme to clown on the failures of AI products, especially in a time when AI is becoming more ubiquitous. We’ve seen this with bad spelling on ChatGPT, video generators’ failure to understand how humans eat spaghetti, and Grok AI news summaries on X that, like Google, don’t understand satire. But these memes could actually serve as useful feedback for companies developing and testing AI.
Despite the high-profile nature of these flaws, tech companies often downplay their impact.
“The examples we’ve seen are generally very uncommon queries, and aren’t representative of most people’s experiences,” Google told TechCrunch in an emailed statement. “We conducted extensive testing before launching this new experience, and will use these isolated examples as we continue to refine our systems overall.”
Not all users see the same AI results, and by the time a particularly bad AI suggestion gets around, the issue has often already been rectified. In a more recent case that went viral, Google suggested that if you’re making pizza but the cheese won’t stick, you could add about an eighth of a cup of glue to the sauce to “give it more tackiness.” As it turned out, the AI is pulling this answer from an eleven-year-old Reddit comment from a user named “f––smith.”
