Grog, aka Baby Yoda, at San Diego Pride. It’s unclear if Grogu is gay, but he’s definitely an ally (Getty)
Google’s new AI Overview feature was introduced to users this week, and it certainly made waves: though perhaps not for the reasons Google expected.
Unfortunately, the feature still seems to have a lot of bugs, as instead of giving an exact answer, the tool seems to include weird and wonderful information from old Reddit posts, among other things.
A few days ago, the tool returned a now-viral answer to the question of how best to make pizza cheese stick. AI’s answer suggested using glue in tomato sauce… a “solution” we want to make absolutely clear, we don’t recommend.
Internet sleuths did a little digging and found that the suggestion appears to come from an 11-year-old Reddit post by a user named “F**ksmith.”
Gizmodo also reports that the tool delivers false historical information that would instantly cause any student to fail mid-semester.
If you ask “which US president went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison,” the bot’s AI replies that 13 presidents did, but then goes on to claim that those 13 presidents achieved 59 different degrees, mostly after they died. Gizmodo cites the example of the 17th president, Andrew Johnson, who apparently held several titles between 1947 and 2012, even though he died in 1875.
This in turn has led to the inevitable influx of fake AI memes, many of which come from somewhere other than gay Twitter, or gay X, as we should probably call it now.
Slurpy Faggi and Dr. Bhutto
One viral tweet that caught the attention of many people (including us at first – we’re willing to admit it) suggested that the AI Overview tool had invented two gay men Star Wars characters called Slurpy Faggi and his friend, Dr. Bhutto.
According to a screenshot shared by user X with the name @computer_gay, the AI Overview tool responded to his Star Wars question with: “Yes, there are some LGBTQ+ characters in the Star Wars franchise, including characters who are openly gay, lesbian, or androgynous.” That’s right.
He went on to give an example of a gay character: “Slurpy Faggi: The first openly gay character in Star Wars. Slurpy is in a committed relationship with her boyfriend, Dr. Butt.” That’s not true.
Naturally, X/Twitter responded as it usually does, with plenty of jokes. One person tweeted: “That’s what they called me in high school”. Another shared a photo of C-3P0 and R2D2 with the caption: “Wasn’t it obvious?”
The third referred to the fact that Star Wars creator George Lucas invented a fictional type of music known as “jizz,” so they didn’t leave him to create Slurpy and Butt (not that he would, of course).
Another fake tweet The AI overview applies similar results to Nintendo’s character list. Yoshi is apparently a “tender, non-binary lesbian” and Wario is a “messy, polyamorous bottom”. It sounds good.
The AI Overview feature uses Google’s AI tool Gemini, which is supposed to be Google’s answer to Chat-GPT.
Gemini was developed as part of the Astra project. The Astra project website says the goal is to develop “artificial intelligence agents that can quickly process multimodal information, think about the context you’re in, and respond to questions at a conversational pace, making interactions much more natural.”
Google also boasts that “with a score of 90.0%, Gemini Ultra is the first model to outperform human experts on MMLU (Massive Multitasking Language Understanding).
Based on this initial test, though, it looks like we should stick with at least a few human experts for now—unless we want to spend the next few years eating glue-flavored pizza and failing historical tests.
This article was updated at 3:30 p.m. on May 24 to confirm that the result of Slurpy Faggi and Dr. Butto wasn’t actually created by Google’s AI review..
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