AI Overviews hallucinates that Airbus, not Boeing, involved in fatal Air India crash

When major events occur, most people rush on Google to find information. Increasingly, the first thing they see is an overview of AI, a functionality that already has the reputation of making glaring errors. In the wake of a tragic plane crash in India, the results of the search for AI of Google distribute the misinformation claiming that the incident involved an Airbus plane – it was actually a Boeing 787.

Travelers are more attentive to line planes models these days after a series of accidents involving the 737 Boeing range several years ago. Research on airline disasters are sure to soar in the coming days, with information that more than 200 passengers and crew have lost their lives in the Crash of Air India flight 171. The functioning of the generative AI means that some people are looking for details can get the bad impression on the Google results page.

Not all research obtains the answers to AI, but Google has regularly expanded this functionality since it made its debut last year. A researcher on Reddit spotted disturbing confabulation when looking for accidents involving Airbus plans. IA glimps, apparently overwhelmed by results reported on the India air accident, said with confidence (and wrongly) that it was an Airbus A330 which fell from the sky shortly after takeoff. We have done some similar research – some of the AI ​​results say that Boeing, some say Airbus, and some include a strange mixture of Airbus and Boeing. It’s a mess.

But why does Google evoke the India air crash in the context of Airbus? Unfortunately, it is impossible to predict if you will get an overview of the AI ​​that blames Boeing or Airbus – the generative AI is non -deterministic, which means that the output is different each time, even for identical inputs. Our best supposition for the underlying cause is that many articles on the India air crash mention Airbus as the main competitor of Boeing. AI’s overviews essentially sum up these results, and AI tackles the wrong path because it does not have the capacity to understand what is true.