Quick pulse check on Google’s AI search? As of yesterday, as reported by The Verge, it was still recommending putting glue on pizza. So things are still looking rough, in other words.
Google’s chatbot-infused search product, dubbed AI Overview, recently became the subject of mass internet derision after users discovered that the search AI’s paraphrased regurgitations of web results are often miserably, hilariously, or even dangerously incorrect. Netizens and journalists alike took to Twitter in droves to share the AI’s many whacky responses various queries, but none was more viral than the AI’s suggestion that, to keep cheese from sliding off of pizza, home chefs might consider mixing non-toxic glue into their pizza sauce. (The original source of this recommendation, we should note, appears to have been an 11-year-old Reddit comment from a user who went by the handle “Fucksmith.” A hero among mortals.)
The dismal public reaction to the tool sent Google — which has maintained that the viral AI responses were mostly responses to “uncommon” search queries — scrambling to manually remove certain AI-generated responses from Google results. And yet, per the Verge, Google’s AI was still recommending putting glue on pizza as recently as this week — and in fact, its answer was arguably worse than before.
When the Fucksmith-sourced glue claim first went viral, the AI-regurgitated suggestion didn’t include any inline citations to specific sources or media outlets.
But this week, per the Verge, Google’s response read differently. This time around, the AI specifically cited a Business Insider article that detailed reporter Katie Notopoulos’ experience making and — yes — eating the glue pizza. Incredibly, though, Google’s AI still didn’t tell users that they shouldn’t make glue pizza. Instead, it presented Notopoulos’ work as if it was a review of a real recipe.
As first flagged on Bluesky by a user named Colin McMillen, one such remix of the Insider article read something like this:
According to Katie Notopoulos of Business Insider, you should add 1/8 cup, or 2 tablespoons, of white, nontoxic glue to pizza sauce to keep cheese from sliding off. Notopoulos says that mixing the glue into the sauce didn’t significantly change its consistency, and the resulting pizza sauce had an orange color similar to vodka sauce.
It’s dizzying AI search ouroboros. On the one hand, the discovery seems to prove Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s recent concession that the company doesn’t yet have a solution to its search AI’s inaccuracy problem. Beyond that, it also adds a fascinating — and frustrating — new layer to questions about Google’s relationship with publishers and content creators in a new, AI-driven era of search.
Already, the idea of the search market’s premier landlord — which publishers widely rely on for the distribution of their product — swallowing journalists’ work into its AI and spitting that information back out without permission or compensation has proven controversial. After all, if users get the information they’re looking for from the AI at the top of the page, what incentive do they have to actually click on an article itself?
The AI’s latest response to the pizza question further complicates this controversy. This time around, Google is prominently citing a news outlet and even the journalist who wrote the article, as opposed to just offering a smattering of links to various sources at the bottom of the overview. (Which, though it may not necessarily translate to a money-making click for the publisher, is arguably a little bit better than straight-up plagiarism.) But in doing so, the AI completely misrepresents both publisher and journalist, miserably failing to get the point while implicating a news publisher in objectively terrible advice.
We couldn’t replicate the result today, so it looks like Google might have manually removed this AI Overview from cropping up on its search page once again.
But as Google continues its bumpy foray into the business of creating content — rather than mainly just aggregating it — it’s likely to continue to encounter similar questions of accuracy and accountability that the publishers its AI is often cribbing its information from face themselves. Citing others’ work is essential — but so is actually getting the details right.
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