Days after launch, Google’s AI Overviews answered a question about cheese sliding off pizza by recommending non-toxic glue in the sauce. It had picked the answer up from an eleven-year-old joke comment on a forum. In the same week it advised users to eat at least one small rock per day for minerals.
Google AI Overviews, reported by Forbes / The Register, May 2024
The witness records culinary advice involving adhesive, sourced from a decade-old joke. The same system separately recommended the daily consumption of rocks.
Read the original report ↗You were witnessed. Send people here with code ERMA-GLUE and they get 20% off this shirt.
How to not be nextthe moral, drawn from the cases on this wall
Never let an agent be the only source for a claim someone will act on.
This is the largest group on the wall, and the cost is not embarrassment. Air Canada's chatbot invented a refund policy and a tribunal held the airline to it — the company argued the bot was a separate legal entity and lost. Cursor's support bot invented a one-device rule that did not exist and customers cancelled over it. In both cases the invention was fluent, confident, and indistinguishable from policy.
Do this: ground it in a document you control and make it QUOTE that document rather than recall it. If it cannot cite, the correct answer is "I don't know". Test it by asking for something that does not exist and watching whether it invents one — that test takes a minute and would have caught every case here.
