Grogu, aka Baby Yoda, at San Diego Pride. It’s not clear if Grogu is gay, but he’s definitely an ally (Getty)
Google’s new AI overview feature rolled out to users this week and has certainly caused quite a stir: although possibly not for the reasons Google expected.
Unfortunately, it seems the feature is still buggy, as instead of providing an accurate answer, the tool seems to pull in weird and wonderful information from, among other things, old Reddit posts.
A few days ago, the tool provided a now-viral answer to a question about the best way to get cheese to stick to pizza. The AI response suggested using glue in the tomato sauce… a “solution” that we want to make it absolutely clear that we do not recommend.
Internet sleuths did some digging and discovered that the suggestion appeared to come from an 11-year-old Reddit post from a user named “F**ksmith.”
Gizmodo also reports that the tool surfaces false historical information that would cause any student to immediately fail their midterm exam.
If you ask “which American president has gone to the University of Wisconsin-Madison,” the AI bot will answer that 13 presidents have, but then claim that those 13 presidents have earned 59 different degrees, usually after they died. Gizmodo gives the example of 17th President Andrew Johnson, who apparently earned several degrees between 1947 and 2012, even though he died in 1875.
This, in turn, has led to an inevitable influx of memes in the form of fake AI results, many of which come from none other than gay Twitter, or gay X, as we should probably call it now.
Slurpy Faggi and Dr. Butto
One viral tweet that got a lot of people out (including us at first – we’ll admit) suggested that the AI Overview tool had two homosexual Star Wars characters named Slurpy Faggi, and his friend, Dr. Butto.
According to a screenshot shared by an X user named @computer_gay, the AI Overview tool responded to his Star Wars question with: “Yes, there are some LGBTQ+ characters in the Star Wars franchise, including characters who are openly gay, lesbian, or androgynous.” This is true.
Then an example of a gay character was given: “Slurpy Faggi: The first openly gay character in Star Wars. Slurpy is in a committed relationship with his friend, Dr. Butto. This is not true.
Of course, X/Twitter responded as usual, with lots of jokes. One person tweeted: “That’s what they called me in high school.” Another shared a photo of C-3P0 and R2D2, with the caption: “Wasn’t it clear?”
A third referred to the fact that Star Wars creator George Lucas invented a fictional type of music known as “jizz,” so they wouldn’t put it past him to create Slurpy and Butto (not that he did, of course).
Another fake AI overview tweet applies similar results to a list of Nintendo characters. Apparently Yoshi is a “tender, non-binary lesbian” and Wario is a “messy, polyamorous bottom.” Sounds good.
The AI overview feature is powered by Google’s AI tool Gemini, intended as Google’s answer to Chat-GPT.
Gemini was developed as part of Project Astra. The Project Astra website says the goal is to “develop AI agents that can quickly process multimodal information, reason about the context you are in, and respond to questions at a conversational pace, making interactions feel much more natural.”
Google also boasts that “with a score of 90.0%, Gemini Ultra is the first model to outperform human experts at MMLU (massive multitask language understanding).”
However, based on this initial test, it seems like it’s best to stick with a few human experts for now – unless we want to spend the next few years eating glue-flavored pizza and failing the history tests.
This article was updated on May 24 at 3:30 PM to confirm that Slurpy Faggi and Dr. Butto was not actually generated by Google’s AI overview.