Incident 609: Flawed AI in Google Search Reportedly Misinforms about Geography

Description: Google's search AI erroneously claimed no African country begins with 'K', along with various other geography-and-letter-based questions, misguiding users with a flawed featured snippet. Originating from ChatGPT-written posts and inaccurately scraped by Google, this incident highlights issues in AI-generated content and misinformation in search results, compromising Google's reliability as an information source.

Editor Notes: Incident 609 is occasionally being referenced in reports associated with Incident 693.

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Entities

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Alleged: Google and ChatGPT developed an AI system deployed by Google, which harmed General public.

Incident Stats

Incident ID

609

Report Count

Incident Date

2023-08-16

Editors

Daniel Atherton

Applied Taxonomies

MIT

MIT Taxonomy Classifications

Machine-Classified

Taxonomy Details

Risk Subdomain

3.1. False or misleading information

Risk Domain

Misinformation

Entity

Timing

Post-deployment

Intent

Unintentional

Incident Reports

Reports Timeline

AI Search Is Turning Into the Problem Everyone Worried About

theatlantic.com

Google’s Search AI Is Absolutely Horrible at Geography

futurism.com

theatlantic.com · 2023

There is no easy way to explain the sum of Google’s knowledge. It is ever-expanding. Endless. A growing web of hundreds of billions of websites, more data than even 100,000 of the most expensive iPhones mashed together could possibly store.…

futurism.com · 2023

Google's AI-powered search doesn't understand geography. Or, apparently, the alphabet. And definitely not both at the same time.

It all started when a Bluesky user declared that Google is now "dead." They included a screenshot of Google's f…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.