Following an exposé by the UK's Guardian newspaper, which uncovered that Google's AI Overviews were disseminating misleading information in response to health-related inquiries, Google has opted to eliminate this feature from certain medical search results pertaining to liver function. The Guardian's inquiry revealed that when users posed questions about the standard range for liver blood tests, the AI Overview furnished numerical values without accounting for pivotal variables such as nationality, gender, ethnicity, and age. This oversight had the potential to mislead users into making erroneous assessments about their health status. Presently, Google has excised the AI Overviews from search results for queries including 'normal range for liver blood tests' and 'normal range for liver function tests,' although analogous variations of these queries might still prompt AI-generated summary responses. Nevertheless, a TechCrunch journalist's testing indicated that the AI Overviews module is no longer visible on pertinent search result pages. Google articulated that the company would refrain from commenting on 'specific removal instances' in search but would persist in 'implementing widespread enhancements,' with an in-house team of clinicians having scrutinized the relevant queries.
