Google has defended its AI’s controversial search results, blaming users for asking ridiculous questions that supposedly lead to these dumb answers. While we’re sure that some users did ask dumb questions on purpose, others asked basic things and were told to put glue on pizza.
Liz Reid, Google’s head of search, posted on the company’s blog and defended the company’s AI search engine. In the blog post, Reid says that users are mostly responsible for the bad answers we’ve seen, even revealing that some of the screenshots “leaked” were fake.
“There’s nothing quite like having millions of people using the feature with many novel searches,” she writes. “We’ve also seen nonsensical new searches, seemingly aimed at producing erroneous results.”
While there are definitely some insincere questions from users, The Verge points out that questions like “how many bones does a mammal have?” is entirely fair game. Young users will look online for answers to their homework and AI answers like these are going to be damaging.
Users have noticed that the Google AI has stolen answers from various websites that the search engine prohibits. It’s proof that this tech still needs a lot of training from the company, as these search results are not satisfactory.
Many users have decided against using the AI, even making a new Chrome extension that doesn’t make use of this technology. AI is still in its infancy and engineers are still trying to make it come up with realistic answers. For now, it seems like these devs will have to work even harder to make AI work, especially with all of these wild answers.
Google is one of the richest companies in the world and the fact that they still can’t make AI work shows how much time this technology needs. Hopefully, they can improve it to a level where users don’t get really bad answers when searching for simple things. It’s going to take some time and most users are okay with that.