Google announced on Thursday that it would refine and retool its summaries of search results generated by artificial intelligence, posting a blog explaining why the feature was returning bizarre and inaccurate answers that included telling people to eat rocks or add glue to pizza sauce. The company will reduce the scope of searches that will return an AI-written summary. Google has added several restrictions on the types of searches that would generate AI Overview results, the company's head of search, Liz Reid, said, as well as "limited the inclusion of satire and humor content". The company is also taking action against what it described as a small number of AI Overviews that violate its content policies, which it said occurred in fewer than 1 in 7m unique search queries where the feature appeared. The AI Overviews feature, which Google released in the US this month, quickly produced viral examples of the tool misinterpreting information and appearing to use satirical sources like the Onion or joke Reddit posts to generate answers.

Liz Reid, head of Google Search, has admitted the company's search engine has returned some "odd, inaccurate or unhelpful AI Overviews" after the feature rolled out to everyone in the US. The executive's explanation outlined some new safeguards to help the new feature return more accurate (and less funny) results. Some of the worst AI Overview results doing the rounds were apparently faked, but the glue-on-pizza example was real, as was the viral answer to how many rocks you should be eating. Reid said Google came up with an answer because it had tapped into a comedy satire site. The issue for Google is this could erode trust in the search engine's results and accuracy.