Barack Obama: The First US Muslim President? Google's AI Overview Faces Backlash For Describing Ex-President As Such

Earlier this month, Alphabet Inc.'s GOOG GOOGL Google began rolling out "AI Overviews," previously known as Search Generative Experience or SGE, to the users in the U.S. However, now after almost two weeks, the feature appears to give users more headaches than utility. 

What Happened: On social media platforms like X, formerly Twitter and Threads, users have been bombarding screenshots of summaries shared by AI Overviews — and it's filled with rather unusual responses. 

For instance, when a user asked how to prevent the cheese from falling off their pizza, the Google AI suggested adding glue to the sauce. The worst part is Google based the answer on a Reddit comment but failed to pick up on the sarcasm.

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Another erroneous response stated that former U.S. President Barack Obama was the first Muslim President of the U.S.

Here are some other examples: 

Google spokesperson told Benzinga: “The examples we’ve seen are generally very uncommon queries, and aren't representative of most people's experiences. The vast majority of AI Overviews provide high quality information, with links to dig deeper on the web. Our systems aim to automatically prevent policy-violating content from appearing in AI Overviews. If policy-violating content does appear, we will take action as appropriate. We conducted extensive testing before launching this new experience, and will use these isolated examples as we continue to refine our systems overall.”

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Why It Matters: The AI Overviews feature was unveiled at the Google I/O event earlier this month, where it provided a questionable solution for fixing a jammed film camera. This feature’s widespread deployment by Google, despite its flaws, highlights the challenges faced by companies developing AI technologies.

Google has also acknowledged that this wouldn’t be perfect, adding a “Generative AI is experimental” label at the bottom of the AI answers. However, it’s evident that these tools are not yet capable of accurately providing information at scale.

Previously, it was reported that while Google CEO Sundar Pichai has been touting the success of this feature, Google Trends data shows that many people are searching for ways to “turn off AI on Google.”

Meanwhile, in February, earlier this year, Google faced a massive uproar over its Gemini AI chatbot. The tech giant's AI innovation received criticism from tech moguls like Elon Musk also for generating historically inaccurate images and text. 

At the time, Google’s CEO reportedly said that this issue was completely unacceptable. At the time, Google stated, “We're already working to address recent issues with Gemini's image generation feature. While we do this, we're going to pause the image generation of people and will re-release an improved version soon.”

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