Sometimes to save the internet, you must eat glue

I’m not one to casually toss around the H-word, but sure, you can say it: I’m a hero.

On Thursday, Google accounted in a blog post that it would be scaling back the AI search results it had rolled out the week before somewhat disastrous and hilarious ends. For example, its Google AI Overviews results suggested that it was good to eat one rock per day (which was presented seriously but was based on an article from The Onion), that Barack Obama was the first gay president, and that the way to keep the cheese from sliding off your pizza was to add 1/8 of a cup of glue to the sauce.

The glue pizza search result was traced back to a comment from a Redditor who went by “fucksmith” making an obvious joke on the subreddit r/Pizza.

Because I’m both brave and a genius, naturally, I had to try to make the glue pizza myself.

I made a homemade pizza with a special ingredient — glue! — as suggested by AI

Now, Liz Reid, the head of search at Google, wrote in Thursday’s blog post that Google will limit the use of satirical content in its AI-generated search results (no more answers from The Onion, for instance) and user-generated content for AI-generated advice (being more careful with answers from Reddit, whose content Google is paying $60 million a year for, according to reports).

The past week paid A lot of attention to how bad many of these AI-generated search results were — mainly because they were wacky and funny. Was Google’s response to tamp down its big AI search ambitions just because a few jokesters on X made silly queries? Maybe.

Could it be because Google took the feedback seriously and realized there were use cases they hadn’t expected and needed to retool based on this new information? Maybe.

Could it be a combination of those two things—that a small minority of trolls abusing the system for laughs revealed some serious flaws and dangers of putting AI in search results? It wasn’t just a PR disaster for a week; it made Google seriously rethink the safety of the AI Overviews product and what it would actually be used for. Most likely.

But let’s not overlook one crucial factor here: I actually ate the glue pizza. (It did not taste good; please do not do this at home).

In my dreams, I like to believe that Google CEO Sundar Pichai saw a picture of my gaping maw ingesting polyvinyl acetate and cheese, fell to his knees, and cried out, “What have I done?!?” Sacrificing my palate and the equilibrium of microplastics in my bloodstream was not in vain or merely for clicks; it slowed the steamroller of AI that is destroying all that we loved about the old internet.

The sheer absurdity of those AI responses, which often leave us scratching our heads, does raise a valid question about the reliance on AI for Google search results.

What’s the purpose of these AI-generated results, the notion that you should ‘let Google do the Googling for you’, when you can exercise your own discernment to choose the link that seems to offer the most credible answer? As Max Read aptly puts it, ‘I may be in the minority, but I prefer to have a range of potential results and use the cognitive abilities honed over millions of years by my ancestors to decipher the context, tone, and intent.’

Similarly, as John Herrman points out in his piece for New York Magazine, humans have developed a knack for sifting through Google results: ‘Recognizing that you might encounter some gibberish, scams, humor, and ads while on your quest, or realizing that you might not, is part and parcel of using Google. By attempting to automate this process, Google has exposed — and perhaps even discovered — the difficulty of the task and how disconnected its understanding of its users has become.’

I don’t necessarily think that AI search results are a terrible idea and will never be good. I believe Google when it says that most people, most of the time, have enjoyed AI search results. That’s mostly been my experience, too.

Is it because Google rolled this out with such easily exploitable flaws? That wasn’t good. But fixing it? That’s good. And I like to convince myself that my eating glue pizza was part of the noise that prompted Google to act.

Please, please … I don’t need your thanks. I’m just doing my job! As they say, not all heroes wear capes. Some just eat glue!