Google's AI Search Results Are Going to Kill Us

By Jen Maravegias | Social Media | May 28, 2024 |

By Jen Maravegias | Social Media | May 28, 2024 |

We’ve been conditioned to believe that the AI uprising, the one where machines take over the world and destroy all humans, would be violent and bloody. I, Robot, The Terminator, 2001: A Space Odyssey , and Westworld are all great examples of machines/AI attempting to leave humanity in the dust, or the vacuum of space.

In 1999, even Disney tried to warn us with the Disney Channel Original Movie, Smart House.

That’s the kid-friendly version of 1977’s Demon Seed, which was more famously spoofed by The Simpsons in Treehouse of Horror XII’s House Of Whacks. I’m still haunted by this movie and its “murderously intelligent, sensually self-programmed non-being” Proteus 4.

I vote that we officially retire the phrase “sensually self-programmed” immediately. Let’s get ahead of that right now because AI is happening, and it’s progressing at a rate that is sure to lead us to sexbots sooner rather than later.

While we’ve all been on the alert for a bloody robot revolution, AI has been developed to kill us by quieter methods. Google Search recently released its “AI Overviews” tool that displays results and information aggregated from all over the web at the top of your search results. It’s redundant because the search results were already an aggregate of pages. But now, Google is scraping pages for data to summarize before you get to the search results. Unfortunately, nobody trained the Google bot to understand the difference between information and misinformation. Or between straight reporting and satire. So, last week, we saw screenshots shared across social media of Google AI results that suggested using a gluestick to make melted cheese stick to pizza better.

Online sleuths attributed that advice to an 11-year-old reply to a question on Reddit. This makes sense when you know that Reddit signed a contract with Alphabet (Google’s parent company) worth about $60 million a year to make its content available for AI training. If you’re going to do that, you need to teach the machine the difference between real answers and shitposting.

Earlier this month, we were also advised to eat one small rock a day, based on information scraped from a 2021 Onion article. To be fair to our impending machine overlords, even I have trouble with Onion headlines sometimes.

oh my god

[image or embed]

— Tim Onion (@bencollins.bsky.social) May 23, 2024 at 6:59 PM

Neither of those things will kill you right away, but no one is recommending them. A
Business Insider reporter actually put glue on her pizza, and I hope she got a bonus for the article she wrote.

You know what will kill you? Mixing bleach and vinegar, which was one of the AI search result suggestions when someone asked how to sanitize their washing machine.

I hope no one at Business Insider tries that.

Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, referred to these results as “hallucinations.” Which is kind of like saying androids dream of electric sheep. Pichai explained in an interview that these are an “inherent feature” in AI Large Language Models. Last week, it didn’t sound like there was any plan to address them. And he would prefer if we stopped worrying about Google search results giving us bad information or trying to poison us. It’s no big deal, folks! Everything will work itself out. Please continue using Google Search without criticizing the company or the AI’s weird acid trip, thank you very much.

The greatest acronym there ever was is G.I.G.O. Garbage In, Garbage Out. Using Reddit as a $60 million source means a lot of garbage being taken in. Even without Reddit, the internet is full of garbage. If this were a movie, we’d be in the early pages of the script, where the protagonist is warned about the dangers of giving AI too much power over them. Of course, those warnings will go ignored, and the protagonist will find themself strapped into some weird headpiece that reads their brainwaves so the machine can learn how to be human and figure out what scares humans the most so they can use that information to kill them.

Oh look, there’s already a movie coming out about that.

Latency will be in theaters on June 14th. Until then, vet your sources and watch out for AI’s garbage, people.