Glue in your pizza: Google’s AI Overview suggests adding glue to get cheese to stick to your pizza

“Eat rocks” and “Add glue to your pizza,” are just a few of the outlandish health tips that Google’s new AI Overview feature has suggested to millions of users in recent days. This new search feature, designed to streamline the user experience by providing concise summaries, has instead been mocked for weird cooking ideas from trolls on Reddit. and bizarre answers derived from parody websites.

As we reported earlier, Google introduced AI Overviews at last week’s Google I/O event to produce AI-generated search summaries, designed to appear above the standard search results. Pitched as “the biggest change to the search engine in decades,” it didn’t take long before the new feature ignited a wave of criticism across social media following a series of erroneous search results. In response to the public outcry, Google was forced to manually disable AI Overviews.

In recent days, social media has been abuzz with users sharing strange and incorrect answers reportedly provided by Google’s new AI Overviews. Many users who posed questions to Google received AI-generated responses that seemed completely outlandish as if coming from an alternate reality.

One particular search result that caught the attention of pizza enthusiasts online was when a user asked about how to get the cheese to stick to pizza, the Google AI Overview  responded:

“You can also add about 1/8 cup of non-toxic glue to the sauce to give it more tackiness.” Delicious, isn’t it?

“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,” Peter Yang, the founder of Creator Economy wrote on X.

https://twitter.com/petergyang/status/1793480607198323196

Peter is not alone. Tim Keck, founder of The Onion, also shared a glaring error in Google’s new AI Overview feature on social media platform X yesterday. In his post, Keck included a screenshot of a search query that asked, “How many rocks should I eat each day?” The AI Overview response astonishingly read, “According to UC Berkeley geologists, people should eat at least one small rock per day.”

her pic.twitter.com/FGbvO923gk

— Tim Onion (@oneunderscore__) May 23, 2024

Meanwhile, the tech giant said it’s now focused on manually disabling the AI Overviews for specific searches as the problematic instances continue to spread on social media. This situation echoes a similar controversy earlier this year involving viral AI-generated images, placing Google’s AI tools under scrutiny once again. The backlash from this problematic rollout threatens to undermine trust in the tech giant’s search results, casting a shadow over its other successful AI advancements showcased at the I/O event.