Back in the day, getting fooled by a fake cheat code from word of mouth or early web forums was almost a rite of passage for gamers.
It’s been a long time since people were playing Pokemon Yellow and Final Fantasy for the first time, however, and AI has apparently taken over the role that used to be filled by your idiot brother.
As veteran gaming journalist Stephen Totilo reported in his Game File newsletter, Google’s disastrous AI Overviews have been caught repeatedly giving terrible advice on “Trash Goblin,” an indie game from the UK studio Spilt Milk, in which users play as a cute little goblin digging through trash to find shiny treasures that he cleans and sells in his shop.
As Totilo notes, the goblin cleans his wares by chiseling away at them, which players simulate by clicking with their mouses. It’s impossible to damage the trinkets during gameplay — but when the journalist asked Google whether such harm can occur, its AI Overviews told a big fat lie.
“Yes, trinkets in Trash Goblin can be damaged while chipping away at the surrounding cruft,” the AI unhelpfully hallucinated.
To make things worse, the AI Overview then hallucinated a not-so-useful tip for players to avoid something that, again, cannot happen in the actual game.
“You need to be careful when removing the cruft, especially the parts directly attached to the trinket, as hitting them could cause the trinket to break,” the AI fabulated.
This is far from the first we’ve seen of its AI Overviews getting factual claims completely garbled.
From falsely claiming that 26-year-old indie artist MJ Lenderman has won 14 Grammys and suggesting that parents smear poop on balloons when potty-training their kids, to telling people to put glue on pizza and making up weird folk sayings, these error-laden AI summaries are often hilarious and nonsensical.
As comical as those instances may be, they also act as harbingers for more serious errors, especially because Google decided earlier this year to add health advice to AI Overviews — and it’s troubling to imagine the same feature that once suggested that elephants can fit in the palm of one’s hand spitting out medical information.
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