glue on pizza
In plain wordsA notorious 2024 blunder in which Google's AI search summaries told people to add glue to pizza sauce, having taken an old joke from an online forum as genuine advice.
Shorthand for a 2024 episode in which Google's AI Overviews — LLMlarge language model, n.: A computer program trained on enormous amounts of text to predict the words that come next. At vast scale, that simple skill lets it chat, answer questions, translate, summarize and write code.-written summaries shown above search results — recommended mixing non-toxic glue into pizza sauce to stop the cheese sliding off and, in answer to other queries, advised eating a small rock a day. The answers drew on retrievedretrieval-augmented generation, n.: Giving an AI an open-book exam: before answering, it looks up relevant passages in a set of documents and bases its reply on them, often citing where each point came from. sources: a joke comment posted on Reddit about a decade earlier and a satirical article from The Onion, which the system treated as authoritative. The phrase now names a characteristic failure of groundedgrounding, n.: Connecting an AI's words to something real — trusted documents, a live search, images or the physical world — so that its answers rest on evidence rather than only on what it absorbed in training. generation: faithfully summarizing a source that is itself unreliable, without judging its credibility, intent or humor. It is cited in discussions of AI search quality, source ranking and the risks of deploying generative features to billions of users.
Retrieval fixes hallucination only if the retriever can tell a recipe from a joke — remember glue on pizza.
Origin
Google made AI Overviews available to all US users after its I/O conference on 14 May 2024; screenshots of the glue and rock answers went viral the following week. On 30 May 2024 Liz Reid, head of Google Search, acknowledged the errors, blamed satirical and troll content and gaps in reliable information on unusual queries, and announced restrictions.
Usage note
Some viral screenshots of absurd AI Overviews were fabricated, but the glue and rock answers were confirmed. Arguably not a hallucinationhallucination, n.: When an AI states something false or made up — a fake fact, quotation or source — fluently and confidently, as if it were true. in the strict sense: the claims were copied faithfully from real, if unserious, sources.
Related
- retrieval-augmented generationretrieval-augmented generation, n.: Giving an AI an open-book exam: before answering, it looks up relevant passages in a set of documents and bases its reply on them, often citing where each point came from.
- groundinggrounding, n.: Connecting an AI's words to something real — trusted documents, a live search, images or the physical world — so that its answers rest on evidence rather than only on what it absorbed in training.
- hallucinationhallucination, n.: When an AI states something false or made up — a fake fact, quotation or source — fluently and confidently, as if it were true.
- AI slopAI slop, n.: Low-quality content churned out in bulk by AI — bland articles, fake-looking images, filler videos — posted to grab clicks or fill space, with little care for accuracy or value.
- GeminiGemini, prop. n.: Google's family of AI models and its chatbot assistant, launched in December 2023. Gemini models handle text, images, audio and video and power many Google products.
- jagged intelligencejagged intelligence, n.: The uneven pattern of AI abilities: today's systems can solve very hard problems yet fail at some a child could manage, so their skills form a spiky profile rather than a smooth one.
Mentioned in
GalacticaGalactica, prop. n.: A science-focused AI language model released by Meta in November 2022 and pulled after three days because it confidently produced fake scientific papers and facts.