Do you have a headache or is it a sinus infection? What does a stress fracture feel like? Should you be worried about the pain in your chest? If you Google those questions now, the answers may be written by artificial intelligence.
This month, Google rolled out a new feature called A.I. Overviews that uses generative A.I., a type of machine-learning technology that is trained on information from across the internet and produces conversational answers to some search questions in a matter of seconds.
In the weeks since the tool launched, users have encountered a wide array of inaccuracies and odd answers on a range of subjects. But when it comes to how it answers health questions, experts said the stakes were particularly high. The technology could point people toward healthier habits or needed medical care, but it also has the potential to give inaccurate information. The A.I. can sometimes fabricate facts. And if its answers are shaped by websites that aren’t grounded in science, it might offer advice that goes against medical guidance or poses a risk to a person’s health.
The system has already been shown to produce bad answers seemingly based on flawed sources. When asked “how many rocks should I eat,” for example, A.I. Overviews told some users to eat at least one rock a day for vitamins and minerals.
“You can’t trust everything you read,” said Dr. Karandeep Singh, chief health A.I. officer at UC San Diego Health. In health, he said, the source of your information is essential.
Hema Budaraju, a Google senior director of product management who helps to lead work on A.I. Overview, said that health searches had “additional guardrails,” but declined to describe those in detail. Searches that are deemed dangerous or explicit, or that indicate that someone is in a vulnerable situation, such as with self-harm, do not trigger A.I. summaries, she said.
Google declined to provide a detailed list of websites that support the information in A.I. Overviews, but said that the tool worked in conjunction with the Google Knowledge Graph, an existing information system that has pulled billions of facts from hundreds of sources.
The new search responses do specify some sources; for health questions, these are often websites like the Mayo Clinic, WebMD, the World Health Organization and the scientific research hub PubMed. But it isn’t an exhaustive list: The tool can also pull from Wikipedia, blog posts, Reddit and e-commerce websites. And it doesn’t tell users which facts came from which sources.
With a standard search result, many users would be able to distinguish immediately between a reputable medical website and a candy company. But a single block of text that combines information from multiple sources might cause confusion.
“And that’s if people are even looking at the source,” said Dr. Seema Yasmin, the director of the Stanford Health Communication Initiative, adding, “I don’t know if people are looking, or if we’ve really taught them adequately to look.” She said her own research on misinformation had made her pessimistic about the average user’s interest in looking beyond a quick answer.
As for the accuracy of the chocolate answer, Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and professor of medicine at Tufts University, said that it had some facts mostly correct and that it summarized research into chocolate’s health benefits. But it does not distinguish between strong evidence provided by randomized trials and weaker evidence from observational studies, he said, or provide any caveats on the evidence.