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Google’s “AI Overviews” feature, which appears unbidden at the top of regular Google searches, has been roundly mocked since its launch for providing terrible answers to factual queries.
At first it recommended eating rocks and putting glue on pizza, and it’s continued to struggle, making absurd declarations like that eggs melt in the microwave and that you can fit baby elephants in the palm of your hand.
Now, AI Overviews is bestowing an up-and-coming young artist with a nonexistent Grammy Award. When you Google whether North Carolina-based indie rock sensation MJ Lenderman has won any Grammys, AI Overviews confidently — and incorrectly — claims that the 26-year-old basketball lover has won 14 of the gold gramophones.
In reality, he’s won zero. For anyone whose interest in the buzzy young artist has been piqued amid news that he’s no longer going to tour with Wednesday, another North Carolina band fronted by his ex-girlfriend Karly Hartzman, that search result may mislead them into thinking he has.
Most striking? The source of Google’s erroneous claim is a single, not-at-all-viral tweet that reads “congrats to MJ Lenderman on his record 14 Grammy wins tonight.”
Ironically, that overview doesn’t include the Grammy nod that the singer-songwriter was actually involved in: his feature on “Right Back to It,” a beatific single from Waxahatchee’s album “Tigers Blood” that was nominated for “Best Americana Album,” but didn’t win.
More than a year after launch, it’s admittedly kind of funny that AI Overviews are still making such obvious, dumb mistakes. But it does make you wonder: at what point is the search giant hoping to have a mature, trustworthy product to offer its billions of users?
When we reached out to Google to ask about the error and faulty sourcing, a spokesperson said that given how much information there is out there, the AI will sometimes get it wrong.
“AI Overviews aim to provide links to high quality content so that people can click through to learn more, but for some queries there may not be a lot of high quality web content available,” they said. “We have guardrails and policies in place to protect against low quality responses and when issues arise we use those examples to improve and take appropriate action under our policies.”
At press time, the error has yet to be corrected. AI Overviews continued to claim Lenderman has won 14 Grammys, linking to that same joke tweet.
When contacted about this strange happenstance, Lenderman’s representative Jacob Daneman said that for now, the artist will hold off on entering the fray because “he’ll probably want to save any comment for his acceptance speech when he does in fact win those 14 Grammys.”
More on Google’s dumb AI: Google Hit With Lawsuit Over Its Loathsome AI Overviews
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