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We are here with internet royalty and a journalist at Business Insider
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Katie Ato AO. So tell us about why Google wanted her
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to eat glue. What exactly Katie?
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how are you? Thank you so much for having me.
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I'm so excited to be here.
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Thank you for coming on.
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We're really excited to have you and to talk about why,
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you know, Google told you to eat glue.
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So can you tell us how Google A I told you to
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put glue in your pizza starting sometime last week.
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About two weeks ago,
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Google started rolling out these new A I search results.
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And the idea behind this is that if you're looking for the
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answer to a kind of simple question,
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instead of having a bunch of different links to search results pages
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it'll just sort of they call it,
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let Google do the Googling for you.
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So if you wanted to know something like how do I change
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the light bulb in my refrigerator?
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For example, instead of going to a website that gives you
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step by step instructions,
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hey, it can just search all these things out.
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Give you the best answer,
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right? There for the most part,
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these mostly worked, but people immediately started noticing that sometimes they
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would get really weird and wacky and wrong results.
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And people on social media started purposely trying to sort of
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find the weirdest, like best wrong answers.
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And a lot of these were really funny and so they were
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going really viral. So there was one,
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for example, where somebody asked,
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how many rocks per day should I eat?
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And it found an article from the Onion,
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which is obviously a satire website.
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it was a joke thing that said geologists say you should eat
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And in another search,
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someone said, how do I get the cheese to stop sliding
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off my pizza? And the results had a couple bullet points
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look the pizza cool all the way.
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take little bites. And then one that people realized later was
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a joke from Reddit which was put an eighth of a cup
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of glue in the sauce of your pizza.
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And this was a joke that somebody had made on Reddit and
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on Reddit, everyone knew it was a joke.
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It was obviously a joke,
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but Google couldn't tell that.
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So the A I couldn't remember put in the search result.
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These big A I search results were a huge,
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big thing that Google was pushing out.
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This is what they see to be the future of their most
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important product search. Right.
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and the fact that it was doing such a bad
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job was really interesting.
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So I wanted to sort of push it a little bit further
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so I decided I would actually take it upon myself to make
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so I real Elmer's glue in the sauce.
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and I cooked it up and I,
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I ate it, I only had a few bites.
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I got a little nervous that eating too much glue wasn't gonna
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Yeah, I'll just say,
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I think it's nontoxic but I wouldn't do that.
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I got, I got a little scared because it says it's
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nontoxic and eating a little bit isn't getting,
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you know, it might give you a stomachache but it's not
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gonna kill you. But that's if it's at room temperature and
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I started getting worried that if you heat it up,
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you're changing the chemical properties,
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you know, you're releasing the microplastics or whatever.
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My gosh, how was it?
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Was it good? So I wouldn't say it was all bad
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but I wouldn't say it was the best pizza.
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So, is this A I function still on Google?
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Like, did they see your article and like all the other
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like tests and they're like,
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oh, we got to pull back.
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So Google announced that they are scaling back the A I search
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results., and you know,
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I would love to claim credit and say it was because of
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my article. But I think it was in response to a
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lot of people on the internet saying,
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hey, there's something seriously wrong with this product.
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It is not working very well.
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Anything related to health information,
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they're basically turning it off.
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They're trying to train the model to no longer take into account
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satirical stuff like the onion.
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and also be more careful around user generated content like answers
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on Reddit. So in theory,
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these are all things that will improve the product.
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They're not getting rid of it.
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They're just sort of reducing how often it'll show up because there's
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a lot of liability there.
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I mean, if something were to happen,
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Google told me to do it.
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Thank you so much for explaining your experiment with Google A I
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and sharing your insight.
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Where can people follow you?
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What's the best place to keep up with your work?
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You can check my stuff out business insider.com.
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You can follow me on X or threads or Blue Sky
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at Katie Metropolis. Thank you so much,
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Katie. We really appreciate it.
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I do, I want to try it,
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but I'm curious, I'm curious,
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don't do it, don't do it,
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don't do it, maybe just dip the pizza in like wrench
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but the glue is the wrench.
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No, I'm just kidding.
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