Google's AI overview search results are so dumb, it took author Chuck Wendig just weeks to convince it he has a cat named 'Sir Mewlington Von Pissbreath' that can speak 'limited Cantonese'
One of the most obnoxious traits of the AI slop era is the way any phrase you type into Google is now likely to prompt an AI overview speculating about what a sequence of words means, making up a bunch of stuff whole cloth, and being completely wrong.
Last week while trying to find traces of an internet forum I remembered from my teens, I typed in the site's slogan—"Grimmest and Most Frostbitten Kvlt of Fool's Gold"—which Google's AI overview spun up a completely nonsense answer for: "The grimmest, most frostbitten "kvlt" (cult) of fool's gold is Iron Pyrite (FeS2)." Google further explained that the "'Kvlt aspect" was due to fool's gold being "often considered more valuable than real gold in the fictional universe of Azeroth (World of Warcraft)." Whatever, man.
The other most obnoxious trait of Google's AI search results is that when it does actually recognize what you're referencing, it will source a bunch of random information, assemble it into what looks like a factual overview, and still be completely wrong. Case in point: Author Chuck Wendig does not have a pet cat, but that didn't stop Google's AI overview from citing a blog in which he jokes about a cat named Sir Mewlington Von Pissbreath.
In a December post titled Vital Cat Update, Wendig expressed surprise that a Google search for "Does Chuck Wendig have a cat" was prompting an AI overview claiming he did have one such pet, named Boomba, according to the website "Wengie Wiki." (Astute readers will note that "Boomba" is not the same name as Sir Mewlington Von Pissbreath; this is because Google's AI overviews are even stupider and easier to manipulate than you might already think).
"You might be saying, 'Chuck, I didn’t know you had a cat!' and I’d respond with, 'I didn’t know I had a cat either,'" wrote the author of Star Wars novels and his own fantasy series'. Wendig bowed to the wisdom of the AI, which he called "totally not a piece of shit that just makes up information willy-fucking-nilly," and embedded several more search results in which the AI overview explained his cat Boomba had died, and that he had adopted a new cat named Franken. Google cited Wendig's blog for this information—curious, since a cursory search of the blog reveals he'd never used the words "Boomba" or "Franken" once.
The blog goes on to show that running multiple searches related to the names of his imaginary pets resulted in Google's AI overview continually making up new names and pets one after another. It also said that he had cancer, and had "embraced Christianity in a public way."
"This is just a nice little reminder that generative AI is shit," Wendig wrote. "Total shit! It scrapes everything we’ve ever written and then can’t even sort through it fast enough to give us a correct answer, all the while burning down the world to lie to us. What a truly nightmarish thing we’ve created! Jesus Christ we are cooked!"
Wendig ended the post by referencing his cat "who is named Sir Mewlington Von Pissbreath and who is definitely real and who is six years old and who wears a little top hat and also can speak limited Cantonese."
Six weeks later, Google's AI results have incorporated Sir Mewlington into the vast corpus of "facts" it will serve up, incorrectly, as it endeavors to make every search result page untrustworthy.
Good blog, though. Wendig further excoriated AI—specifically about its use in the publishing world—in another post in late December, which is soothing if you appreciate published authors saying things like "I think AI is only inevitable when we believe the lie of its inevitability." Maybe reading it will make you feel a tiny bit more sane in an insane world.