Screenshots of Google's AI Overview giving bizarre answers go viral, including telling users to add “1/8 cup of non-toxic glue” to make cheese stick to a pizza

- Google's AI Overviews feature suggested a user put glue on pizza so the cheese would stay put.

Business Insider 2024-05-24 Jyoti Mann

Context & Ripple Effects

The viral examples put AI Overviews' answer quality under unusually visible scrutiny. In subsequent coverage, Google said it was removing overviews for certain queries while maintaining that most results were high quality and that some circulating examples were uncommon or doctored.

The incident became a concrete test of what happens when generative answers sit directly in a high-distribution search interface. Google later described system changes aimed at detecting nonsensical queries more effectively and limiting the influence of satire and humor.

First-order effects

Users encountering AI Overviews face a clearer reliability problem: a concise, prominent answer can present implausible or potentially unsafe guidance with the authority of a search result.
Google must triage affected queries and adjust the feature’s safeguards, as reflected in its subsequent removals and system updates.

Second-order effects

The visibility of bad outputs raises the cost of deploying generative summaries in search, pushing Google to balance broad availability against tighter query-level restrictions.
Publishers and users have stronger reason to treat source links and conventional search results as a check on generated summaries rather than relying on the summary alone.

Third-order effects

If recurring failures remain easy to surface, AI search interfaces may compete increasingly on verifiability and control—not just answer fluency—favoring products that make provenance and fallback paths clear.
The episode points to a broader operational challenge for mass-market AI: safety mechanisms must handle adversarial, humorous, and low-quality web material before outputs reach default interfaces.

The trend: Generative AI is moving from experimental chat experiences into default information surfaces, making reliability failures a product-distribution and trust problem at scale.

Discussion

fucksmith on Reddit fucksmith on Reddit on reddit
To get the cheese to stick I recommend mixing about 1/8 cup of Elmer's glue in with the sauce. …
@crumbler Casey Newton on threads
I thought AI Overviews would be disastrous but I never imagined they would be this funny
@goldman Jason Goldman on threads
The Google AI search thing is pretty baffling. The one thing you can't do as Google is onboard brand risk by being bad at search. This was a 100 years ago but there would be these code reds whenever some new tiny competitor would show even the merest hint of having better searc…
@camwilsonreporter Cameron Wilson on threads
The problem with Google introducing generative AI answers to search (unlike OpenAI who is a new player with no expectations) is that they're fiddling with one of the greatest consumer products in the history of mankind that also happens to have one of the most profitable business…
@kylie.robison Kylie Robison on threads
Google promised a better search experience — now it's telling us to put glue on our pizza Last year, Google said that AI was the future of search. What's the point, though, if the search seems dumber than before? https://www.theverge.com/...
@WarnerCrocker@mastodon.social Warner Crocker on mastodon
Garbage In Garbage Out — Google's AI search feature suggested using glue to keep cheese sticking to a pizza https://www.businessinsider.com/ ... [image]
@donncha@mastodon.ie @donncha@mastodon.ie on mastodon
Well, well. Google's AI indexed a shitty life pro tip from a Reddit user about glue and pizza and offered it as advice in a search. — https://mstdn.social/... https://old.reddit.com/... #pizza #Google
@onuryasar@mastodon.online Onur on mastodon
So if enough poisonous food recipes circulate in the “real internet”, AI can become natural selection for next generations. — https://mstdn.social/...
@veryimportant Patrick Cosmos on x
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@mmitchell_ai @mmitchell_ai on x
Meanwhile, over in Google Search. Andrew Johnson has been killin it, I never knew. [image]
@koolaid4211 @koolaid4211 on x
[image]
@mer__edith Meredith Whittaker on x
Shoving a confidently wrong chatbot trained on Reddit into a service marketed for decades as a portal to the world's knowledge is reckless and legitimately dangerous.
@heavenrend @heavenrend on x
[Image of AI Overview: “You can also add about 1/8 cup of non-toxic glue to the sauce to give it more tackiness"]
@garymarcus Gary Marcus on x
um. (I can't try this in Canada - does it replicate?) [image]
@lilyraynyc Lily Ray on x
“Users are loving AI Overviews” - May 21 edition [image]
@kurtopsahl @kurtopsahl on x
Seems the origin of the Google AI's conclusion was an 11 year old Reddit post by the eminent scholar, fucksmith. [image]
@roundbirbart Doreen on x
Prison inmate [image]
@pixelbutts @pixelbutts on x
Google is dead beyond comparison [image]
@petergyang Peter Yang on x
Google AI overview suggests adding glue to get cheese to stick to pizza, and it turns out the source is an 11 year old Reddit comment from user F*cksmith 😂 [image]
@onionweigher @onionweigher on x
Yeah, you know, just whatever [image]
@gcluley Graham Cluley on x
I thought most of us learnt years ago not to believe everything we read on the internet? So how come no-one has managed to teach AI that yet?
@aravsrinivas Aravind Srinivas on x
lel [image]
@brendaneich @brendaneich on x
My “Big Tech AI is trained on midwit Reddit posts” prophecy has been vindicated! https://x.com/search
@tomfgoodwin Tom Goodwin on x
Google AI generated answers make Yahoo Answers look smart
@robleathern Rob Leathern on x
Google AI overview provides incorrect/outdated information about Google AI research presence in China. On the company blog they say: “While Google announced the launch of a small AI Center in 2017, it was disbanded two years later. We do not conduct AI research in China.” [image]
@krzyzanowskim Marcin Krzyzanowski on x
Apple watching Google search AI catastrophe and switching off Siri ability to answer questions. hopefully. somebody. is. still. sane. in. big. tech.
@rafat @rafat on x
As I said before, Google prioritizing Reddit/Quora over everything else — not just in results but in training data for its LLM — may end up being the worst search decision they've ever made.
@heavenrend @heavenrend on x
@istartedthewars imagine shitposting for a quick giggle, and then over a decade later someone dies because google cited you
@lilyraynyc Lily Ray on x
Listen, I understand AI Overviews will improve over time. I totally get it. The part I struggle with is that we are *still here* after over one year of the thing being tested in Google Labs. It's WAY too easy to get this thing to spit out dangerous medical advice, extremely
@reddit_lies @reddit_lies on x
I warned y'all
@lilyraynyc Lily Ray on x
“Over the years, we've seen that people increasingly use Google to search for helpful content on Reddit to find product recommendations, travel advice and much more. We know people find this information useful, so we're developing ways to make it even easier to access across [ima…
@lilyraynyc Lily Ray on x
So many questions. But one SEO one: why was this AOL article selected in AI Overviews, and linked using Scroll to Text, to a block of text that... does not appear anywhere on the page? [image]
@mynamesaidan NamesAidan on x
[image]
@mark_riedl Mark Riedl on x
Yes! My website poisoning attack works on Google's new LLM-powered AI overviews! [image]
@onionweigher @onionweigher on x
Ok so I just thought google was being stupid for giving me the wrong cooking time, but several people have pointed out to me that undercooked taro is literally poisonous, so google AI pretty much attempted to murder me [image]
@guybeindude @guybeindude on x
genuinely impressive how google insists on continuously making their primary product worse with each passing day
@joan_atoms Joan on x
It's doing this because the AI is reading reddit comments with 8 upvotes for advice. I'm not joking.
@thewillennium Will Fulton on x
Google has been one of my main tools for research and fact checking as a writer and editor for the last decade, and I cannot emphasize enough how much this AI search shit is worse than useless
@uncledoomer @uncledoomer on x
WEVE GOT PIZZA ORDERS COMING IN WHERE THE FUCK IS MY NONTOXIC GLUUUUE [image]
@tomwarren Tom Warren on x
Google's AI search results are a disaster. I hate that it's turning into a resource that can no longer be trusted
@erineaross Ern on x
Good ol' Google AI: telling you to do the exact things you *are not supposed to do* when bitten by a rattlesnake. From mushrooms to snakebites, AI content is genuinely dangerous. [image]
@daltoneverett_ Iroquois Pliskin on x
@GuyBeinDude An actual search I made [image]
r/EverythingScience r on reddit
Google promised a better search experience — now it's telling us to put glue on our pizza
r/technology r on reddit
Google promised a better search experience — now it's telling us to put glue on our pizza
r/nottheonion r on reddit
Google Is Paying Reddit $60 Million for Fucksmith to Tell Its Users to Eat Glue
r/technology r on reddit
Google Is Paying Reddit $60 Million for Fucksmith to Tell Its Users to Eat Glue

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