Google's disclaimer says AI "may include mistakes," which is an understatement.
When major events occur, most people rush to Google to find information. Increasingly, the first thing they see is an AI Overview, a feature that already has areputation for making glaring mistakes. In the wake of atragic plane crash in India, Google's AI search results are spreading misinformation claiming the incident involved an Airbus plane—it was actually a Boeing 787.
Travelers are more attuned to the airliner models these days after a spate ofcrashes involving Boeing's 737 lineupseveral years ago. Searches for airline disasters are sure to skyrocket in the coming days, with reports that more than 200 passengers and crew lost their lives in the Air India Flight 171 crash.The way generative AI operatesmeans some people searching for details may get the wrong impression from Google's results page.
Not all searches get AI answers, but Google has been steadilyexpanding this featuresince it debuted last year. One searcher on Redditspotted a troubling confabulationwhen searching for crashes involving Airbus planes. AI Overviews, apparently overwhelmed with results reporting on the Air India crash, stated confidently (and incorrectly) that it was an Airbus A330 that fell out of the sky shortly after takeoff. We've run a few similar searches—some of the AI results say Boeing, some say Airbus, and some include a strange mashup of both Airbus and Boeing. It's a mess.
But why is Google bringing up the Air India crash at all in the context of Airbus? Unfortunately, it's impossible to predict if you'll get an AI Overview that blames Boeing or Airbus—generative AI is non-deterministic, meaning the output is different every time, even for identical inputs. Our best guess for the underlying cause is that numerous articles on the Air India crash mention Airbus as Boeing's main competitor. AI Overviews is essentially summarizing these results, and the AI goes down the wrong path because it lacks the ability to understand what is true.
Google isn't hiding that its generative AI tools can make mistakes—there's a disclaimer at the bottom of every AI Overview that notes "AI answers may include mistakes." Virtually every AI product has a similar line, but it's not very prominent, and users may simply gloss over that when talking to a robot that seems very confident in its wrongness. Perhaps these warnings aren't sufficient when hallucinations remain so common.
In this case, the AI Overview error could rile up Airbus, which probably doesn't want to be mentioned at all in this context. Meanwhile, it could give a little cover to Boeing, which has suffered its fair share of reputational damage from recent issues with its aircraft.
Google tells Ars it has manually removed this response from AI Overviews. Here is the company's full statement.
"As with all Search features, we rigorously make improvements and use examples like this to update our systems. This response is no longer showing. We maintain a high quality bar with all Search features, and the accuracy rate for AI Overviews is on par with other features like Featured Snippets."
Updated 6/12 with statement from Google.
