Did you know that cats have been to the moon? That it’s safe to stare at the sun for 15 minutes, or even longer, as long as you have dark skin? Or that to stay healthy, you should eat one small rock per day?

These are some of the latest pearls of wisdom that Google has been serving to its American users (we aren’t so lucky here yet in the UK). ‘Let Google do the searching for you’, the search giant promised when it introduced a feature called AI Overviews earlier this month. This integrates Google’s Gemini generative-AI model into its search engine. The answers it generates appear above the traditional list of ranked results. And you can’t get rid of them.

AI Overviews hasn’t had the effect that Google hoped for, to say the least. It has certainly garnered immediate internet virality, with people sharing their favourite answers. Not because these are helpful, but because they are so laughable. For instance, when you ask AI Overviews for a list of fruits ending with ‘um’ it returns: ‘Applum, Strawberrum and Coconut.’ This is what, in AI parlance, is called a ‘hallucination’.