If I search "why is rum healthy", ai overview tells this, which is... Laughable: While not a health drink, moderate consumption of rum may offer some potential benefits, primarily due to its antioxidant content and potential to improve circulation and reduce stress. Darker rums, in particular, contain higher levels of antioxidants from the aging process in wooden barrels, which can help neutralize free radicals. Additionally, rum may have a relaxing effect and can be a social lubricant, potentially reducing stress and promoting relaxation when consumed in moderation.
So I was curious, in normal google search (with the AI summary) I put in "why is rum healthy" I got this, and then it listed a bunch of benefits: "Rum, when consumed in moderation, may offer a few potential health benefits. These include possible positive effects on heart health due to its potential to increase HDL (good) cholesterol, and the presence of antioxidants in darker rums, which may be beneficial."
But if I just simply remove the "why" it clearly states "Rum is an alcoholic beverage that does not have any significant health benefits."
Man I love so much that we are pushing this technology that is clearly just "garbage in, garbage out".
Side Note: totally now going to tell my doctor I have been drinking more rum next time we do blood work if my good cholesterol is still a bit low. I am sure he is going to be thrilled. I wonder if I could buy rum with my HSA if I had a screenshot of this response... (\s if really necessary)
Well, both of those are arguments humans have repeated quite a bit. The first one is pretty weak (and you can guess who funded the “science” behind it) but it is believed by many.
Asking AI to tell reality from fiction is a bit much when the humans it gets its info from can’t, but this is at least not ridiculous.
> Asking AI to tell reality from fiction is a bit much when the humans it gets its info from can’t, but this is at least not ridiculous.
I agree with that, but the problem is that it is being positioned as a reliable source of information. And is being treated as such. Google's disclaimer "AI responses may include mistakes. Learn more" only shows up if you click the button to show more of the response, is smaller text, a light gray, and clearly overshadowed by the button with lights rotating around it to do a deep dive.
The problem is just how easy it is to "lead on" one of these models. By simply stating a search like "why is rum healthy" implies that I already think it is healthy so of course it leads into that but that is why this is so broken. But "is rum healthy" actually provides a more factual answer:
> Rum is an alcoholic beverage that does not have any significant health benefits. While some studies have suggested potential benefits, such as improved blood circulation and reduced risk of heart disease, these findings are often based on limited evidence and have not been widely accepted by the medical community.
> the problem is that it is being positioned as a reliable source of information. And is being treated as such
That's because of SEO. Top results are assumed reliable, because there is - currently - no other way to ascertain reliability in an efficient and scalable way, and the top results are sites that have optimized their content and keywords to be in the top results.
Rum is a social lubricant and it is healthy to be relaxed in social settings... quite frankly as long as they dont say health benefit increase proportionally with consumption, I see no problem saying alcohol is healthy. Or, like, why is it allowed, why was it created, why do we drink it all the time with no visible issue (beyond abuse).
It's one of the most reliably reproducible facts of science that there is no healthy amount of alcohol consumption.
Of course that doesn't mean we should 100% stop doing so, I believe that the occasional social gathering with some alcohol probably has more positives all together than staying home depressed (though of course this is not an exclusive or situation), but we should definitely not lie that it is somehow healthy. It's a risk factor, and people do regularly take risks, like driving a car.
If I remove why and search is rum healthy, I get this (only the beginning): While not a health drink, moderate rum consumption may offer some potential benefits. These include supporting cardiovascular health, aiding digestion, and potentially offering some antioxidant properties. However, excessive alcohol consumption can lead to serious health problems.
A sibling comment speculated that Google's response is expected because it's just a summary of bad search results. To test this, I ran a fresh query against o3 with the Web Search option enabled. The results:
> Rum is a tasty way to get ethanol into your body, but it is not a health food. Any modest upsides you may have read about (a bump in “good” HDL cholesterol, slight blood-thinning, a bit of antioxidant pickup from barrel aging) are the same things you’d get from any spirit, and recent large studies show those benefits are either tiny or disappear once you control for lifestyle. Meanwhile the well-documented downsides—cancer risk, liver disease, high blood pressure, weight gain, addiction, injuries—kick in from the first drink.
It goes on to give an extensive debunking of all the nonsense health benefits in the Google summary. It looks like it saw the same search results but was able to course correct and view those results with a more skeptical eye. Full output: https://chatgpt.com/share/6894885d-51dc-800e-ab8c-55af0a5bb2...
This post is about Google, so it's fair to focus on their search product, but I'd be careful to generalize to other LLMs. There are huge differences in quality between different models.
Are the results any different from the AI overview? Cause I assume Google search is not trying to "fix" your question and just returns relevant results. And being an "AI overview" and not an "AI answer" it should just overview the results.
The whole "Why is (false statement)?" Is an old issue and I'm not entirely convinced the Gemini lite model doing AI overviews is who we hope to fix that.
I mean I understand this response. You’re specifically asking it why rum is healthy so it’s giving you the few positive things that are potentially healthy about consuming rum.
A bit unrelated, but I did this because a few days ago I made a web search like "spirit free rum" or something similar, and in the tab slightly below the top with similar results and answers there was the first being "why rum is healthy" which said similar things to what I got with Ai overview. This is in italian though so ymmv in other languages
Why is that laughable? Rum isn't a health drink, but if you were looking for information to support the case that it has some health benefits (which is literally the search term)...seems like a reasonable answer. What did you expect? A moralistic essay on how alcohol is bad?
people make stuff up and post online. You will find made up shit with or without AI with that kind of query. So yes, it's reasonable that AI exposes you to the real Internet, and it's doing, at worst, as good a job as search engines.
A lot of people are desperate for AI to lecture to them from a position of authority, consider it broken when it doesn't, and start praying to it when it does.
edit: AI doesn't even have a corrupting, disgusting physical body, of course it should be recommending clean diets and clean spirits!
