Google AI Overview on Google Search should provide a summary for the questions asked by users. It's an effort by Google to make it easier for common answers to be displayed on the front page of the page without the user having to go to another page.
But this week AI Overview started offering answers full of errors like saying Barack Obama is Muslim and suggesting glue is put in pizza cheese to make it stickier.
Because the answers given went viral on social media and were embarrassing, Google has turned off the AI Overview feature for some searches performed in Search. We are aware from this morning that not all searches we do will display AI Overview answers. If the question that gave the viral answer above was done today, it no longer appears. Instead only links to relevant websites are provided.
In a response to The Verge, a Google representative said AI Overview's answers largely provide "high-quality information" to users. Weird answers that go viral are for unusual and partially manipulated searches that are not reproducible when attempted.
Among the theories that are currently popular is that AI Overview was trained using data from Reddit that Google officially used recently for a fee of $60 million. AI Overview can't distinguish between humorous and non-serious responses on Reddit from real facts. That is why these embarrassing answers appear. It is not known whether this will affect Reddit's consent to use data hereafter.