No, your computer isn’t powered by tiny microscopic bees

Despite what Google’s AI Overviews might want to tell you, modern computers do not run on microscopic bees. You could probably figure that out… couldn’t you?

OK, I can’t lay claim to the original research on this one, but it was all over my social media this weekend, and it amused me while also serving as something of an object lesson in how AI can be remarkably stupid.

Google’s AI Overviews are  intended, as per Google, to “help you quickly find what you’re looking for – providing an AI-generated snapshot about a topic or question, along with key information and links to dig deeper”.

At least, that’s the theory.

If you search for “bees in my computer” — at least in Australia, as tested by this journalist though there seems to be some global variation — then you get this result at the time of publishing:

Do I have to tell you that this is nonsense?

OK, maybe I do, just for the sake of clarity, because somebody might figure that opening up their PC could lead to this:

This is nonsense, but it’s nonsense that does rather show how AI can produce particularly bad results.

Realistically, very few people are going to search for “bees in my computer” unless they actually do have an infestation of them for some reason.

Quick tip here: Don’t use the branches of a flowering tree as the space to store your desktop PC, and this probably won’t happen to you.

No, not even this brand (with a hat tip to Matt for pointing it out to me)

But getting back to AI, the whole thing appears to flow from this April Fool’s post from 2021. As they go, it’s not the worst April’s Fools I’ve ever seen, but it’s also not the best. Google’s AI — at least for now — doesn’t seem to be able to tell the difference, rather like when it couldn’t work out that Kenya was, in fact, in Africa.

As someone who has written for his living (reminder: you can support ART, if you’re so inclined) for the vast majority of my adult life, I’m not much in favour of AI, so I suppose you could say I have something of a bias here.

Still, when AI is going to deliver results like this, am I all that wrong to have that bias?