This comes just months after social media was flooded with instances of often-humorous errors made by AI Overview.
Google parent Alphabet is expanding its AI summary feature for search results to six new countries, including the UK, India, Japan, Brazil, Indonesia and Mexico, in their local languages, such as Hindi, Japanese and Portuguese.
Known as AI Overview, the feature was unveiled at Google I/O in May to give AI-boosted answers for Search queries, with generated summaries, tips and links to referenced sites.
While initially only available in the US, Google said at the time it had ambitious plans of bringing it to more than 1bn people by the end of the year. However, soon after its launch, social media was flooded with instances of often-humorous errors.
One user claimed AI Overviews answered that former US president Andrew Johnson earned 14 degrees, graduating multiple times between 1947 and 2012. Johnson died in 1875. In another instance, it claimed that non-toxic glue can be added to pizza sauce to “give it more tackiness” – based on a post from a Reddit user 11 years ago.
A third answer from AI Overviews claimed that parrots are able to do “a variety of jobs”, including housekeeping, engineering and “prison inmate”. Another user even shared a post of AI Overviews claiming that adding more oil to a cooking oil fire “can help put it out”.
At the time, Google blamed this on the “very different” way that AI Overviews works compared to chatbots and other LLM products.
“They’re not simply generating an output based on training data,” explained Liz Reid, head of Google Search. “While AI Overviews are powered by a customised language model, the model is integrated with our core web ranking systems and designed to carry out traditional ‘search’ tasks, like identifying relevant, high-quality results from our index.
“That’s why AI Overviews don’t just provide text output but include relevant links so people can explore further. Because accuracy is paramount in Search, AI Overviews are built to only show information that is backed up by top web results.”
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