Die neuen KI-Suchfunktionen von Google sind übersät mit Falschinformationen und KI-Halluzinationen.

Submission Statement

Google is feeling the pressure to keep up with its rivals when it comes to AI. Hence its hasty pivot to AI on its main search page. Google Search is a sad shadow of its former glory. It’s become so overrun with SEO-spam that it has steadily become less and less useful. Now they are trying to make it even worse.

Even AI’s supporters acknowledge its deficiencies with regularly returning false information. It’s still useful despite this, but why shove it into something like Google Search, that people used to have trust in?
I’m guessing corporate considerations like earnings and share price dictated this. How bizarre that this short-term thinking is slowly destroying what once was Google’s crown jewel.

I’m not sure if it’s the same as their Gemini chat bot I can text with. It’s impressive with what I’ve gotten it to do, but it’s also frustrating in its responses. It oddly will not tell you where it is sourcing it’s answers from. For example I asked it to solve a common computer programming problem (N-queens) and it gave a nice thorough explanation and response. I asked where it got the answer and it says it can’t tell me but there’s lot of places and could recommend some.

I asked it questions about projectile motion – what angle from horizontal to throw a ball to make it travel farthest. It answers. I asked how hard would I need to throw it for the curvature of the Earth to play a role in the answer. It won’t answer because a human can’t throw that hard. I say what about if I use a cannon? Same thing – cannons don’t shoot that far so no answer will be given. Ok so what about a rocket – still won’t answer and then it goes on about ICBMs and escape velocities.

It also misleads about it’s abilities. It told me it could help me critically read a scientific article if I gave it a link. So I did. It instantly tells me it can’t read that article (It was in Science) but could give me tips on how to read a scientific article critically. That’s a very different task and far less useful.

I then asked it what version of Android am I using, it says it doesn’t have access to that. I asked what versions of Android is Gemini compatible with. It says 10 or 11. I said then I must be using 10 or 11. It agrees but can’t confirm which. 

They tell you it can use your IP address for rough location estimation to make search recommendations, like say if you wanted to reserve a restaurant. So I asked it where I’m located, but it won’t tell me. I reminded it it has access to that, it says yes that’s true, but it can’t tell me the location for privacy reasons. Even when I specify I want it to tell me the IP based information it has, it wont. You can tell there’s this top layer to prevent you from probing what it knows even though you know it has the information.

To be fair, the same thing could be said of ChatGPT. It is, just as well, littered with false information and AI hallucinations.
You have to double-check everything it generates and it’s replies are much more Miss than Hit.