If you’re trying to find out what a restaurant has to offer, you might look up its menu, or go to its Facebook page. Hell, you could call and ask.
But that’s all démodé. Why not query an AI chatbot, a piece of software notorious for inventing facts out of the tokenized ether of the internet, and treat its answer like the word of God?
Here’s why: because you’d annoy the hell out of the restaurant. Just ask the beleaguered owners of the Montana eatery Stefanina’s Wentzville, who are begging their customers to stop using Google’s infamously shambolic AI Overviews to check up on its specials, First Alert 4 reports.
“Please do not use Google AI to find out our specials. Please go on our Facebook page or our website,” the restaurant wrote in a weary Facebook post. “Google AI is not accurate and is telling people specials that do not exist which is causing angry customers yelling at our employees.”
“We cannot control what Google posts or says,” the post added, “and we will not honor the Google AI specials.”
AI chatbots and other large language models remain incredibly prone to hallucinating, which is the industry euphemism for generating plausible-sounding misinformation. Google’s AI Overviews have been mocked for being especially wonky, including for its recommendation that you should put glue on pizza.
But evidently, many remain unaware of the inherent unreliability of these tools.
Eva Gannon, whose family owns the restaurant, told First Alert that Google’s AI kept telling customers about deals that weren’t real and even made up entire menu items. In one example, the Google AI claimed that Stefanina’s was offering a large pizza for the price of a small one.
“It’s coming back on us,” Gannon told the local station. “As a small business,” she reiterated, “we can’t honor a Google AI special.”
The restaurant isn’t the only business to be affected by Google’s AI blunders. In June, a solar firm in Minnesota sued the tech titan for defamation, claiming that the AI Overviews told customers damaging lies about the company that hurt its business. In one case, the AI allegedly fibbed that the solar firm was facing a lawsuit for deceptive sales practices — which was in no way true.
Flubs like these suggest that we shouldn’t be trusting AI tools to inform us about the world or control our decision making, but this is exactly what their creators want us to do with them: carry out mundane tasks and inquiries, ranging from planning your schedule to formulating dinner plans.
Google, for example, is running an entire ad campaign for its Search app’s AI Mode, which beats you over the head that you should “Just Ask Google” before doing literally anything.
On Thursday, the search giant announced that the AI Mode can now help make restaurant reservations for you.
More on AI: Elon Musk Fans Are Brutally Mocking Him for Incessantly “Gooning to AI Anime”