Google AI Overviews are at it again.
About a year after going viral for suggesting recipes like glue pizza and gasoline spaghetti, Google’s AI-powered search summaries (which you can avoid, by the way) are in the news again.
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This time, users are pushing Google’s AI past its limits by creating fake idioms.
How it works
Go to Google and search for a fake idiom. Don’t ask for an explanation, and don’t ask for a backstory. Just simply search something like “A barking cat can’t put out a fire,” “You can’t make grape jelly from an avocado,” or “Never give your pig a dictionary.” It may help if you add “meaning” at the end of your fake idiom when searching.
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Google will not only confirm that what you’ve entered is a real saying, but it will also make up a definition and an origin story. The results can be pretty absurd.
The Duckdog test
To test the theory, I headed to Google and searched a phrase my coworker made up about her dog named Duckdog: “A duckdog never blinks twice.”
Google’s AI immediately responded with an explanation that this was a humorous phrase, not intended to be taken literally, and that it meant “a duck dog, or a duck-like dog, is so focused that it never blinks even twice.” It then provided a plausible explanation: Some ducks sleep with one eye open, so a dog that’s hunting a duck will need to be even more focused.
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It was a pretty impressive explanation.
When I Googled the same phrase again, the story changed entirely. Instead of meaning a hyper-focused dog, the backstory was now tied to something unbelievable — like a duck-dog hybrid. “A duckdog never blinks twice,” Google explained, “emphasizes that something is so unusual or unbelievable that it’s almost impossible to accept, even when it’s presented as fact.”
Googling it again produced yet another explanation (pictured above, along with the star of the fake idiom).
Google’s AI Overviews can be a nice way to get a quick answer, but as this trend shows, you can’t always trust that they’re accurate.
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