Some people likes AI’s capability of taking the hassle out of searching through the web, but others don’t like AI’s unreliable answers – If you belong to the latter, you may find Google’s AI Overviews feature rather annoying. As it turns out, if you want it to shut up, just drop some F-bombs.
Shut The **** Up, Google!
Here’s some context on how Google’s AI Overviews feature works: the AI chatbot usually steps in when the user is looking for guides and factual information, say recipes or product comparisons. Of course, this is all done through information fetched around the web, but if we’ve learned the lesson of glue on pizza, it’s that they are not always reliable.
Of course, with companies desperate to shove everything AI down everyone’s throats, it’s not surprising to know that you can’t exactly turn off the feature (if not at the very least involving a convoluted process). As Ars Technica reports, typing swear words will make AI Overviews disappear from the search results. While other workarounds exist to disable such feature, they’re not inherently intuitive – venting your frustration towards a feature that you didn’t ask for certainly is intuitive in this case.
We’ve tested it ourselves – you need to type the swear word in entirety for this to work. Censoring it like “f******” doesn’t work, so if you’re less than comfortable on dropping the expletives, there’s the other option: simply append “-ai” (without quotes) in the search query and Google will give you real results instead. Interestingly, we find simply using the syntax is more useful than outright swearing at it, which tend to skew the search results to a more vulgar nature.
Pokdepinion: Uninvited AI features sure are frustrating.
