Google’s AI-Powered Search Is Already Promoting Malware and Scams
Earlier this month, Google began rolling out its new search generative experience (SGE), introducing artificial intelligence-generated search results on some pages. Unfortunately, it appears that the new feature has already encountered some glitches, as reports indicate that it may promote scam sites and sites that distribute malware in its generated responses.
This is obviously not a good look at Google’s AI search results, especially since there have been a lot of questions about how viable Google’s AI is , including the fact that Google won’t be putting its latest models on the Pixel 8 . However, despite these concerns, Google continues to forge ahead with its AI endeavors, and it looks like the missteps will continue.
As reported by BleepingComputer , Google search results recommend spam and malicious sites in various answers. This makes it much easier for users to fall for scams, especially if Google offers it to a wider audience with varying levels of knowledge about artificial intelligence.
In a report from BleepingComputer, they noted that when they tried to find puppies for sale, they quickly received AI-generated responses that pointed them to spam sites that could be riddled with malware. When clicking on any of these links, the user was redirected several times until they landed on a fraudulent site. Many sites appeared to be imitating YouTube’s push notifications in an attempt to get users to allow sites to notify them about something. BleedingComputer reports that when they signed up for one of the sites, they began receiving spam with ads for scam tech support services and fake giveaway pages claiming the user had won something.
It should be noted that while working on this article, I enabled Google SGE functionality in Chrome. However, none of the search terms I entered produced answers of this type. In fact, all my searches showed that they were unable to generate any AI responses, so it’s possible that Google is working on a solution to this problem. Still, it’s disappointing to see this happen at all, and it speaks to the ongoing battle the tech giant is waging when it comes to spam and malware-filled websites. If you want to learn more, I highly recommend reading BleepingComputer’s in-depth analysis as they provide a lot of great first-hand experiences that I unfortunately can’t reproduce since SGE doesn’t give me any answers.