Google brings the AI feature that told Americans to eat rocks to six more countries

Google is expanding AI Overviews, the feature that summarizes answers to complex questions from the web and presents them at the top of traditional search results, to six more countries — India, Japan, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil and the United Kingdom — from Thursday with support for local languages as well as English.

That’s less than three months after AI Overviews launched in the United States and promptly told people to eat rocks and put glue on their pizzas. Bringing them to millions more people begs the question: How do you prevent another glue pizza fiasco in a foreign country?

“It’s a challenging space,” Hema Budaraju, senior director of product management for Search at Google, told Engadget in an interview. “Understanding quality at the scale of the web across all these languages is a hard problem, and integrating LLMs (large language models) is not easy to do. Using AI to better understand languages is pretty critical.”

To prevent a glue pizza situation in, say, Hindi or Japanese, Google said it has done language-specific testing of AI Overviews as well as red-teaming, a technique used by the tech industry to stress-test how systems might behave under attack from bad actors. “We are focused on addressing potential issues and we are committed to listening and acting quickly,” Budaraju said. In May, Google put additional guardrails on AI Overviews after its outlandish responses, such as limiting the inclusion of satire and humor content and restricting the types of queries that triggered the feature to begin with.

In addition to expanding the feature to more countries, Google is also making one more big change to AI Overviews: it will now prominently display links to sources on the right-hand side of each AI-generated answer, making it easier for people to click through to the actual website where the answer came from. And for a small percentage of users, it will also add links directly within the text of AI Overviews. If this move is rolled out more broadly, it could allay concerns from publishers about losing traffic to AI that reads the internet for people and reduces the need to click through to actual web pages.

“This experiment has shown early positive results and we are able to drive more traffic with links directly in the text,” Budaraju said.

Users who opt in to Search Labs, the company’s platform for trying out upcoming features ahead of their general release also get to play with a couple of additional features — the ability to “save” a specific AI Overview for future reference, as well as an option to simplify the language of an AI-generated answer, something that Google previewed earlier this year.

Update, August 15 2024, 12:50 PM ET: This story has been updated to clarify that links within the text of AI Overviews are available for a small percentage of users, not just those signed up for Search Labs.