For years, a search for “is it safe to throw used car batteries into the ocean” would show an overview saying that not only is it safe, it’s beneficial to ocean life, so it’s a good thing to do.

At some point, an article about how Google was showing this crap made it to the top of the rankings and they started taking the overview from it rather than the original Quora answer it used before. Somehow it still got it wrong, and just lifted the absurd answer from the article rather than the part where the article says it’s very wrong.

Amusingly, they now refuse to show an AI answer for that particular search.

It looks like the specific phrase form is blocked in Google Search's AI header. It seems most likely that this was because it was being gamed. Searching "is it safe to throw used car batteries into the ocean" gets links to the meme.

All the ML tools seem to clearly say it's not safe, nor ethical - if you ask about throwing batteries in the sea then Google Search's summary is what you'd expect, completely inline with other tools.

If a large swathe of people choose to promote a position that is errant, 'for the memes' or whatever reason, then you're going to break tools that rely on broad agreement of many sources.

It seems like Google did the right thing here - but it also looks like a manual fix/intervention. Do Google still claim not to do that? Is there a watchdog routine that finds these 'attacks' and mitigates the effects?

How do you fix a weird bug in a black box? Return null.