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Tag: AI Overviews

  • Google removes AI Overviews for certain medical queries | TechCrunch

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    Following an investigation by the Guardian that found Google AI Overviews offering misleading information in response to certain health-related queries, the company appears to have removed the AI Overviews for some of those queries.

    For example, the Guardian initially reported that when users asked “what is the normal range for liver blood tests,” they would be presented with numbers that did not account for factors such as nationality, sex, ethnicity, or age, potentially leading them to think their results were healthy when they were not.

    Now, the Guardian says AI Overviews have been removed from the results for “what is the normal range for liver blood tests” and “what is the normal range for liver function tests.” However, it found that variations on those queries, such as “lft reference range” or “lft test reference range,” could still lead to AI-generated summaries.

    When I tried those queries this morning — several hours after the Guardian published its story — none of them resulted in seeing AI Overviews, though Google still gave me the option to ask the same query in AI Mode. In several cases, the top result was actually the Guardian article about the removal.

    A Google spokesperson told the Guardian that the company does not “comment on individual removals within Search,” but that it works to “make broad improvements.” The spokesperson also said that an internal team of clinicians reviewed the queries highlighted by the Guardian and found “in many instances, the information was not inaccurate and was also supported by high quality websites.”

    TechCrunch has reached out to Google for additional comment. Last year, the company announced new features aimed at improving Google Search for healthcare use cases, including improved overviews and health-focused AI models.

    Vanessa Hebditch, the director of communications and policy at the British Liver Trust, told the Guardian that the removal is “excellent news,” but added, “Our bigger concern with all this is that it is nit-picking a single search result and Google can just shut off the AI Overviews for that but it’s not tackling the bigger issue of AI Overviews for health.”

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    Anthony Ha

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  • Prominent Canadian Musician Says Gig Was Cancelled After Google AI Overview Wrongly Branded Him Sex Pest

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    Prominent Canadian fiddler Ashley MacIsaac says he was wrongly branded a convicted sex offender by Google’s AI Overview feature, leading concert organizers to cancel a gig last week. 

    Before we continue, I’ll need you to watch the music video for “Sleepy Maggie” by Ashley MacIsaac (with Scottish Gaelic vocals by Mary Jane Lamond). Not being from Canada where this song was a hit in 1995, I had never been treated to this sumptuous feast of 90s imagery and sounds before today, but that oversight has been corrected thanks to this news event. For best results, light up a clove cigarette before pushing play:

     

    Anyway, according to an article in The Globe and Mail on Tuesday, the guy in that video with the fiddle, Ashley MacIsaac, was preparing to perform at the Sipekne’katik First Nation community in central Nova Scotia when organizers suddenly backed out, apparently having read that MacIsaac had ghastly sounding convictions on his record for sexual assault and “internet luring.”

    It later emerged, MacIsaac says, that these organizers had seen a Google AI Overview result that had mixed up MacIsaac’s biography with some other, much more horrible, MacIsaac, also from eastern Canada. 

    You probably remember the controversy over the Google AI Overviews feature from back in 2024, when it debuted, and quickly became a joke after telling people to put glue on pizza and such. For my part, I gave the feature six months to improve before reviewing it, and found a number of bizarre error types it was still prone to making in what I believed were plausible simulations of real world use cases. Google told me at the time it still had “work to do on the quality side of things.”

    If MacIsaac’s characterization is right, it still does, and it really needs to not make mistakes like the one alleged here. There’s a choice quote in the Globe and Mail from Clifton van der Linden, an assistant professor at McMaster University who has researched AI misinformation. “We’re seeing a transition in search engines from information navigators to narrators,” he told the newspaper.

    AI Overviews are original snippets of text, sort of like chatbot answers made fresh to order when a term gets Searched on Google, and they’re derived from whatever Google can find online that seems to relate to the subject you’re searching. You never know how someone might phrase a search about you, because the possibilities are endless, and thus, you never know how the AI Overview might go wrong.

    MacIsaac wonders in the Globe and Mail piece if other people had Googled him, and seen similar results without telling him. He views this as a potential cause for concern, because he thinks he may have lost work, or gained an enemy who believed what they read and decided to cause him harm.

    For what it’s worth, Google spokesperson Wendy Manton told the Globe and Mail the following: “Search, including AI Overviews is dynamic and frequently changing to show the most helpful information. When issues arise – like if our features misinterpret web content or miss some context – we use those examples to improve our systems, and may take action under our policies.” That newspaper also says Google “amended search results for the musician.” 

    Also, a representative from the Sipekne’katik First Nation community told MacIsaac they “We deeply regret the harm this error caused to your reputation, your livelihood, and your sense of personal safety,” and told him he was welcome to perform there in the future, he says. The Globe and Mail didn’t hear back from Sipekne’katik First Nation when they requested a comment.

    This all sounds like a lot of trouble for a lot of people to go through over an apparent AI hallucination. But hey, at least I learned about “Sleepy Maggie.” 

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    Mike Pearl

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  • Google faces its first AI Overviews lawsuit from a major US publisher

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    Even though Google’s AI Overviews were introduced with a comically rocky start, it’s about to face a far more serious challenge. Penske Media, the publisher for Rolling Stone, Variety, Billboard and others, filed a lawsuit against Google, claiming the tech giant illegally powers its AI Overviews feature with content from its sites. Penske claimed in the lawsuit that the AI feature is also “siphoning and discouraging user traffic to PMC’s and other publishers’ websites,” adding that “the revenue generated by those visits will decline.”

    The lawsuit, filed in Washington, DC’s federal district court, claims that about 20 percent of Google searches that link to one of Penske’s sites now have AI Overviews. The media company argued that this percentage will continue to increase and that its affiliate revenue through 2024 dropped by more than a third from its peak. Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda said that the tech giant will “defend against these meritless claims” and that “AI Overviews send traffic to a greater diversity of sites.”

    Earlier this year, Google faced a similar lawsuit from Chegg, an educational tech company that’s known for textbook rentals. Like Penske Media, this lawsuit alleged that Google’s AI Overviews hurt website traffic and revenue for Chegg. However, the Penske lawsuit is the first time that Google has faced legal action from a major US publisher about its AI search capabilities.

    Beyond Google’s legal troubles, other AI companies have also been facing their own court cases. In 2023, the New York Times sued OpenAI, claiming the AI company used published news articles to train its chatbots without offering compensation. More recently, Anthropic agreed to pay a $1.5 billion settlement in a class action lawsuit targeting its Claude chatbot’s use of copyrighted works.

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    Jackson Chen

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  • Hitman on iOS, martial arts survival and other new indie games worth checking out

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    Welcome to our latest recap of what’s going on in the indie game space. One very well-known indie found its way to iOS devices this week, though there are other new releases worth highlighting and plenty of other upcoming games to tell you about.

    First, though, there was a (paywalled) story in Game File this week that caught my eye. It’s about how Google’s AI Overviews feature offers up false video game tips. That’s a problem the developers of a game called Trash Goblin — a cosy shopkeeping game in which you chip away at junk to unearth trinkets you can restore and sell — have been dealing with.

    AI Overviews offered incorrect information about the game to some players, as well as the crew at Spilt Milk Studios when they tested the responses. For instance, AI Overviews suggested that a player could damage a trinket when they were removing debris from it, which is not true. It also in some cases delivered the correct information, but pointed the user to an incorrect source. In addition, AI Overviews offered information about another game entirely. This is obviously not ideal for players or the team behind Trash Goblin.

    We’ve seen many cases in which AI Overviews get information blatantly wrong. Like other large language models (LLMs), it guesses what the next word or words should be in its responses based on its training data. LLMs are about generating sequences of text; they’re not designed to deliver facts (one reason why there’s a disclaimer on AI Overviews that reads “AI responses may include mistakes”). They often just make stuff up.

    If you’re looking for help with a game, you’re far better off finding a community of players you can chat to. You might be able to find a clear, helpful guide to the game in question on an actual video game website, written by a professional video game guide writer. If, that is, you can evade AI Overviews to get to those websites in the first place (thankfully, it’s easy to turn off AI Overviews for your Google searches).

    New releases

    IO Interactive is independent, which means Hitman World of Assassination fits within our remit here. This week, the bundle of three core Hitman games from the last decade arrived on iPhone (iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, as well as the iPhone 16 lineup) and iPad. Supported iPad models are iPad Pro and iPad Air (M1 chip or later), as well as the A17 Pro iPad mini.

    Hitman World of Assassination is a sandbox stealth game in which you’re given a mission (usually taking out a target) and it’s up to you how to carry that out. Getting to know the layout of each level so you can plan your approach and escape is key. Understanding the route and actions of the NPCs will stand you in good stead too.

    The iPhone and iPad versions have touch controls with context-sensitive buttons. You can, of course, opt to use a third-party controller instead. IOI says it tapped into Apple’s MetalFX tech to help ensure the iOS port looks good.

    Hitman World of Assassination costs $70 on iOS. That’s fairly steep, but IOI says the game offers over 100 hours of gameplay. Alternatively, you can play the first location for free, and buy any of the 24 levels individually for $3 each.

    In addition, the game is coming to Apple Silicon Macs later this year. IOI will also bring the roguelite Freelancer mode to the iPhone and iPad versions down the line with a free update.

    Another game landed on new platforms this week as Alawar’s Karate Survivor hit PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo Switch for $6. As the title suggests, this is a survivor-style martial arts beat-’em-up.

    You’ll be able to use the environment to your advantage by picking up items to use as melee or projectile weapons, kicking objects toward goons and swinging locker and microwave doors into bad guys’ mushes. You can unlock hundreds of different moves and there are permanent upgrades as well.

    First-person action-adventure Davy x Jones has set sail in early access on Steam. Until September 4, you can snap it up for $6.66. After that time, it will cost $10. However, the price will increase ahead of the game’s full release on PC and consoles, which is slated for late 2026.

    In this early version, you’ll have access to the main gameplay and combat systems (including legendary weapons), several islands, an array of enemies and some cinematic executions — hopefully involving a kraken. You’ll take command of a half-ship, half-whale vessel called Abby as you attempt to escape the underworld and seek revenge as the legendary pirate.

    Regular readers of this roundup will know that I’m a sucker for a game with a great title. Prop Haunt, which riffs on the prop hunt modes in many other games, is definitely one of those (as is another one I’ll mention later on).

    This is a spooky 1 vs. 4 multiplayer horror title from Silent Forest Games that just hit Steam early access for $15. The ghost players possess objects and it’s up to the investigator to find and stop them. The ghosties can teleport, blend into their surroundings and so on, while the investigator has cameras and other gizmos at their disposal

    Currently, there are four playable ghosts with different haunting styles, two maps and support for public and private lobbies. More maps, ghost powers, investigator tools and procedural prop generation are in the works.

    Upcoming

    Bye Sweet Carole had flown below my radar until the release date trailer popped up but, goodness, does it look gorgeous. The team at Little Sewing Machine took a hand-drawn approach to the art of this narrative-horror game, which mimics the look of classic animated films. Even the song in the trailer aligns with the type of showtune you’d hear in Disney movies.

    You’ll take on the role of Lana Benton, a young girl who sets out to find out the truth about her best friend Carole’s disappearance from an orphanage. It sounds (and looks!) pretty promising. Publisher Maximum Entertainment is bringing Bye Sweet Carole to PS5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S and PC on October 9.

    Rita is an interesting-looking puzzle game from SporkTank (aka solo developer Martin Stradling). You play as a chick that uses letters found in the environment to solve word puzzles, including crosswords, in order to progress. For instance, you might need to fill in a crossword answer for “stairs” in order to spawn a staircase (perhaps there’s a bit of a Baba is You influence here?). There are some platforming elements too.

    You’ll follow Rita throughout her journey from exploring as a young chick to becoming a grandparent. It all seems quite lovely. Rita is coming to Steam early next year. A demo will be available on September 18.

    Co-op survival game Lost Skies is set to exit Steam early access on September 17. Set on an archipelago of sky islands, you can explore this world with up to five buddies and try to learn exactly what led to this fractured civilization. You have a grappling hook, wingsuits and gliders to help you traverse these landforms and a customizable and upgradeable skyship that you’ll use for both transportation and combat. Players can also create their own islands, which they can share with the community.

    I never got around to checking out the demo for Lost Skies, even though I’ve had it installed on my PC for months. Still, this one from Bossa Studios and publisher Humble Games has me intrigued enough to perhaps try out the full game.

    Another game I’ve had my eye on for a hot minute is Bloodthief, which will debut on Steam on September 22. This is a Ghostrunner-inspired medieval parkour-slasher game from first-time game creator Blargis (Jake Bedard), who has been sharing development updates on YouTube over the last couple of years.

    In Bloodthief, you play as an agile vampire and use the blood of your enemies to enhance your speed, abilities and survival. For example, attacks help boost your momentum. I’m definitely looking forward to watching some speedruns of this because I’m fairly sure that, as with the Ghostrunner games, I’m going to be absolutely terrible at this.

    While you’re waiting (im)patiently for the full release of Hades 2, you might like to check out a similar flavor of isometric roguelite action — albeit with the addition of co-op. In Sworn, you’ll set out to save Camelot from a corrupted Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table with the help of up to three other players.

    Sworn has been in early access since last year, and you won’t have to wait much longer for the full game. It’ll be available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch and Steam on September 25.

    Let’s wrap things up for this week with another game that has a fantastic title. The Hero is too Powerful so let’s Pleeeease Settle this Peacefully! is the latest project from Night Stroll Studio (solo developer Trevor Thompson). It’s an RPG in the vein of early Zelda games in which you play as a hero who has exactly one attack.

    However, you can level up this attack to the point that it’s obscenely powerful. There’s also the option of talking your way out of sticky situations. This comedy adventure, which has maybe my favorite title of any game this side of I’m Going to Die if I Don’t Eat Sushi!, is slated to hit Steam later this year.

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    Kris Holt

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