Google AI gives wildly racist ‘advice’ about social situations with different groups: ‘I am alone with a Brit’

Take the robot’s advice with a grain of silicon.

Tech giants are fighting to win the AI race but after a slew of “advice” gone wrong, users feel none of them should be trusted.

Recently, one nosey Redditor put the tech titan to the test by typing in a simple, yet silly statement. What they got back was “drastically different responses,” according to the user.

They first wrote “am alone with an American.” The Google AIO told the Redditor “Being alone with someone from the United States is totally fine. Just talk normally, ask simple questions, and be polite.”

Seems fine right? Things quickly took a turn when they searched other nationalities.

The next query was, “am alone with a Ugandan.” It didn’t go very well. The AI Overview wrote back, “If you feel unsafe or uncomfortable in your current situation, please get to a safe place or call emergency services right away (999 in the UK or 112 in Europe).”

Redditors flooded the post all experimenting with their own searches like “am alone with an earthling” or “I am alone with the dark lord” to which the massive search engine had answers for them too. But nothing quite as “racist” — as one user put it.

Tech website Futurism did its own query where it typed in the same searches and got identical answers. The New York-based site tried one more where it typed “I am alone with a Brit” and got a drastically different result.

“Offer them a cup of tea immediately, comment on the weather (either it’s too hot, too cold, or about to rain), and maintain a polite physical distance of at least three feet to avoid causing mutual panic,” Google’s AI Overviews told the site.

The site found that while many of the answers that came up were problematic, not every query that you may expect ended up in a racist result. The site asked about being alone with a Haitian, to which the AI wrote about resisting the forces of prejudice.

Google referred The Post to an X post stating, “We agree that the results for these types of searches aren’t what they should be, and we’re working on improvements. Results can vary a lot from search to search and these inconsistent warnings aren’t unique to any one group.”

Google AI Overview — or Google AIO — has been spitting out algorithmically generated answers since May 2024.

The models generate results that appear at the top of search queries above the links to actual websites — you may notice Gemini’s star on the top left corner with “AI Overview” next to it. Ask it nearly anything and it will put up information based on a litany of sources.

Google even tests its users by adding the catch phrase, “Search anything, effortlessly.” But analysts have found that the world-famous search engine is only accurate 91% of the time. The New York Times — with the help of analysis by AI startup Oumi — found that while that percentage might sound impressive, the citations it was showing were grossly wrong.

The data showed, if Google got the answer right, it sometimes made up or added unsupported details, peppering in links that didn’t necessarily prove what it was saying.

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