Google’s new artificial intelligence search tool has advised users that eating rocks can be healthy and to glue cheese to pizza, prompting ridicule and raising questions about its decision to embed an experimental feature into its core product.
“Eating the right rocks can be good for you because they contain minerals that are important for your body’s health,” Google’s AI Overview responded to a query from the Financial Times on Friday, apparently in reference to an April 2021 satirical article from The Onion headlined “Geologists recommend eating at least one small rock per day”.
Other examples of erroneous answers include recommending mixing glue into pizza sauce to increase its “tackiness” and stop the cheese sliding, which may have been based on a joke made 11 years ago on Reddit.