You know how Google’s new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won’t slide off (pssst…please don’t do this.)
Well, according to an interview at The Vergewith Google CEO Sundar Pichai published earlier this week, just before criticism of the outputs really took off, these “hallucinations” are an “inherent feature” of AI large language models (LLM), which is what drives AI Overviews, and this feature “is still an unsolved problem.”
If its job is to write a fan fic on what may or may not be true on what you asked for, then it does a great job. But typically people search for information, and getting what is essentially a glorified auto complete isn’t useful. It’s like big tech has learned nothing about the massive issue of disinformation and just added fuel to the fire to an unsolved problem we’re still very much trying to figure out.