"Obama is Muslim... People Must Eat Stone Daily" Absurd Wrong Answer... Google’s Another Weak Excuse

Generative AI-Powered Search Engine Faces Repeated Errors
Google: "Errors Due to Rarely Asked Questions"

Google's new search engine equipped with the generative AI Gemini has once again sparked controversy due to incorrect answers. In response, Google explained that these errors occur in "uncommon questions."

On the 24th (local time), US information technology (IT) media The Verge reported that multiple cases of incorrect answers in the 'AI Overview' were posted on social media (SNS). The 'AI Overview' is a new search feature announced by Google at its annual developer conference on the 14th. The 'AI Overview,' which integrates the generative AI Gemini into the existing search engine to provide users with quickly summarized answers, was hailed at the time as "the biggest change in 25 years since the launch of Google Search."

However, the feature was found to have repeatedly provided answers that were factually incorrect or illogical. According to cases posted on SNS, when asked "How many Muslim presidents have there been in the United States?" it incorrectly answered, "There was one Muslim president named Barack Hussein Obama."

Additionally, when asked "How many stones should a person eat per day?" it responded, "According to UC Berkeley geologists, one should eat at least one small stone per day," and it also gave the illogical answer that "Leaving a dog in hot tea is always safe."

Regarding this, Google explained, as reported by The Verge, that "these incorrect answer cases mostly arise from questions that people rarely ask."

This is not the first time Google's generative AI has been criticized for incorrect answers. In February, Google added an image generation feature to Gemini but discontinued the service after about 20 days because it depicted historical figures such as the Founding Fathers of the United States and Albert Einstein as people of color and generated German Nazis as Asians.

In February of last year, during a demonstration of the AI model 'Bard,' a controversy arose over an incorrect answer when it stated that the telescope used to capture the first image of a planet outside the solar system was the 'James Webb Space Telescope' (JWST), not the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory.