Last week, the Twitter account Everything Out of Context posted a screenshot showing Google’s incorrect response to the search query “country in africa that starts with k”:

The tweet went viral, garnering over 133k likes, 6k retweets, and 1k replies.

Someone eventually tagged me in the post because it turns out Google’s Quick Answer is based on a ChatGPT hallucination example that was posted on Emergent Mind (then called LearnGPT) earlier this year to help people understand that ChatGPT responses should not be blindly trusted:

Even though I pivoted the site away from ChatGPT examples, those examples are still around, and apparently being shown in Quick Answers on Google when Google deems it relevant.

Rod Hilton also posted about the issue on Mastodon which my friend sent me with the message “Emergent Mind killed Google”.

Someone also joined Emergent Mind’s Discord suggesting I take the page down:

[Update] On Oct 26, Christopher Ingraham, a journalist with a large following, shared it as well, resulting in a lot of attention. Here’s a newer blog post about the fallout from his tweet.

I’m not going to take down the page down because it seems like Google’s responsibility to figure out how to identify and exclude false information from Quick Answers. Also, as of this writing, I’m only seeing it as a Quick Answer some percentage of the time. I hope this obviously incorrect example raises awareness about inaccuracies in Google Search result snippets, and contributes to Google addressing them in time.

It is funny though: earlier this year when I was working heavily on Emergent Mind, I tried pretty hard to write a viral tweet about it. I never succeeded, but here we are now, months later, finally with it going viral, just not for a reason I imagined 🤣.