Google Is in Its Elizabeth Holmes Era

The new artificial intelligence features Google announced just weeks ago are finally breaking through to the mainstream--albeit not in the manner Google might prefer. As you may have gleaned from recent coverage and chatter (or even experienced yourself), the autogenerated A.I. Overviews now sitting atop so many Google search results are giving answers that … well, to call them incorrect is true but doesn't quite nail it. Try surreal and ridiculous and potentially dangerous instead. Since their rollout, A.I. Overviews have told users to smoke cigarettes while pregnant, add glue to their home-baked pizza, sprinkle used antifreeze on their lawns, and boil mint in order to cure their appendicitis. To address the erroneous answers to both straightforward and jokey queries, Google appears to be addressing each incident one by one and tweaking the relevant Overviews accordingly. Still, the broken top-of-Google answers may even be spilling over into the search engine's other features, like its automatic calculator: One U.S.–based user found, posting a screenshot to X, that Google's tech couldn't even scan that the unit cm stands for centimeter, reading the measure as a whole meter.