Google’s artificial intelligence search feature has drawn criticism after producing incorrect spellings and inaccurate letter counts in simple word queries.
According to TechCrunch, the AI Overview feature stated there were two “p” letters in the word Google. In another example, it identified two “d” letters in the word journalism, but incorrectly spelled the word as “j-o-u-r-n-a-d-i-s-m”.
The system also misspelled the surname of the United States president, while attempting to identify the number of “p” letters in the name.
The issue has renewed concerns surrounding Google’s increasing reliance on generative artificial intelligence in its search engine. Earlier versions of the AI Overview feature had produced misleading responses, including advice sourced from satirical articles and online forum posts.
Google acknowledged the issue in a statement to TechCrunch, saying that counting letters within words remained a known challenge for large language models and that efforts were under way to address the problem.
Researchers say such systems are not designed to understand spelling in the same manner as humans. Large language models process text through token-based systems, converting words into numerical representations rather than recognising individual letters.
Matthew Guzdial, an artificial intelligence researcher at the University of Alberta, said transformer-based models do not actually read text in a human sense, but instead rely on encoded meanings attached to words.
Experts added that the structure of modern language models made spelling tasks difficult to resolve completely, despite advances in artificial intelligence capabilities.
The latest errors have again highlighted concerns over the reliability of AI-generated responses and the need for users to verify information independently.
