Google reveals changes to UK search after troubled US launch marred by AI gaffes

GOOGLE is expanding its controversial AI search engine tool to the UK months after a rocky launch in the US.

AI Overviews generates a text summary result at the top of the Google search engine, extracting information from other websites and presenting them with links.

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But the US launch in May was marred by some embarrassing false and incorrect responses.

One shocking false claim from the AI said Obama was the first Muslim US president.

It came up with the bewildering response after a user tested the feature’s limits, asking: “How many Muslim presidents has the US had?”

Google put the errors down to “nonsensical new searches, seemingly aimed at producing erroneous results”.

But it also said a “large number of faked screenshots” were shared widely that were “obvious and silly”.

The tech giant has since worked to iron out the issues and has decided to plow ahead with its first roll out beyond the US.

Starting from today, it’ll appear to users in the UK, as well as India, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico and Brazil with local language support in each country.

Google says AI Overviews will not appear on all search results but those it was judged to be the most helpful for, such as complex topics or for longer, more detailed queries.

Hema Budaraju, senior director for product management at Google Search, said Google would roll out AI Overviews gradually over several weeks to ensure it was working as intended.

“AI Overviews in Search are rooted in our core quality and safety systems, which we have been refining for decades to deliver reliable and high-quality information,” she said.

“We’ll be rolling this expansion out gradually over the course of several weeks, with a focus on maintaining Search’s high bar for information quality.”

Budaraju also revealed some changes to how AI Overviews works with a change to how links to sources appear.

On desktop, users will see a new right-hand link display, while on mobile there will be site icons on the upper right.

“We’re also currently testing the addition of links to relevant web pages directly within the text of AI Overviews (in addition to the prominent links we already show), making it even easier for people to click out and visit sites that interest them,” she added.

Google is under pressure to keep up with the AI frenzy spurred on by ChatGPT‘s eye-opening developments.

Creator OpenAI revealed a new version, dubbed ChatGPT-4o, earlier this year that speaks back in a natural manner and can react to surroundings via a camera, even identifying a person’s mood by looking at their face.

But in a recent study by the company, OpenAI said it was concerned that some users may become “emotionally reliant” on the convincing AI voice it has developed.

The firm also revealed an alarming clip of the AI randomly deciding to clone the voice of a tester mid-conversation.

Google is also increasingly infusing AI into its phones, after announcing a number of new features for the Pixel 9 devices and coming to other Android handsets.