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Google’s AI Overviews are responding like traditional AI chatbots if you search for terms like “disregard” or “skip.”
Google’s AI Overviews are running into an interesting problem right now. As of this writing, if you search for the term “disregard,” instead of showing the usual AI-generated summary of search results, the AI Overview section instead includes a response like what you’d see from a more traditional AI chatbot, as called out by a post on X.
I searched for “disregard” again later and got another response, which you can see in the image at the top of this post.
AI Overviews aren’t just tripping up over the word “disregard.” When searching for “ignore,” Google’s AI Overview section showed the following message to a Verge colleague:
Message received! I’m here and ready to help. What would you like to focus on today? Just let me know if there’s a specific topic, task, or question you’d like to explore.
It looks like your message was just a test or a typo! Feel free to ask a question, share a prompt, or let me know how I can help you with your tasks today. I’m ready whenever you are!
Google didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment about what’s going on. However, this is almost certainly just some kind of funny bug. Maybe Google Search itself is tired after everything that happened at Google I/O.