> Google, a search engine which does not have human emotions, assumed that I had been spurned by a man in my life named Dario and decided what I wanted was an empathetic digital friend.

I'm not sure why this is a surprise. Google most likely uses an efficient yet limited language model to give us search answers. When a search query does not have strong or specific enough context, the model will sample and find what most of the training material will cover. That is, the most likely average behavior covered in the training data. In this case, "hes never coming over dario" is such a generic sentence, so unless Google happens to have indexed what the author mentioned and ranked it high, the answer would appear natural to the AI. Or using the AI jargon, the answer appears to be properly aligned.

If you further type "its an NBA meme", Google AI correctly responds: "The origin of the phrase "Dario is never coming over" dates back to a classic Joel Embiid meme from the peak "Trust the Process" era of the Philadelphia 76ers."

> I'm not sure why this is a surprise. Google most likely uses an efficient yet limited language model to give us search answers.

The surprise is that Google decided such an "efficient yet limited language model" is suitable to be shown before actual search results on every search, even though it gets things so wrong, so often. It's not about the technical limitation or design. You really don't understand why that business decision is surprising to users?