If you’ve googled anything recently, you probably noticed a helpful-looking AI summary popping up before the rest of your search results, like this:
Seems handy, but unfortunately, AI is prone to “hallucinating” (aka making things up). These hallucinations happen because chatbots built on large language models or LLMs “learn” by ingesting huge amounts of text. However, the AI doesn’t actually know things or understand text in the same way that humans do. Instead, it uses an algorithm to predict which words are most likely to come next based on all the data in its training set. According to the New York Times, testing has found newer AI models hallucinate at rates as high as 79%.
Recently, on the website formerly known as Twitter, people have been sharing some of the funniest Gemini AI hallucinations they’ve come across in Google search results, many in response to this viral tweet:
Here are 15 of the best/worst ones:
1.
It’s not good at knowing things like how much an adult human weighs:
2.
And it’s deeply unqualified to be your therapist:
3.
It’s about as good at solving word problems as a stoned 15-year-old.
5.
And it does NOT have great spaghetti recipes.
6.
Sometimes, it gives you the right answer for all the wrong reasons, as in this case, where the person likely wanted to know if Marlon Brando was in the 1995 movie Heat.
7.
However, it might be really, really good at improv, because this is one hell of a “yes, and.”
8.
Almost makes me want to see this imaginary episode of Frasier… almost.
9.
Sometimes, I just don’t know what to say.
10.
Like, even with the right facts, it can arrive at the exact wrong answer.
11.
It’s almost impressive how wrong it can be.
12.
Definitely don’t use it to look for concert tickets.
13.
Don’t take its airport security tips.
15.
And finally, please, please, please don’t eat rocks.
Currently, there’s still no way for Google users to turn off these AI-generated search summaries, but there are a couple of ways to get around them. One method is to add -ai to the end of your search query like this:
Some people swear that adding curse words to your search query will prevent AI summaries, but it hasn’t worked for me:
And finally, if you’re on a desktop computer, selecting “web” from the menu just below the search bar will show you the top results from around the web with no AI summary: