Article 6TZ9S “Just give me the f***ing links!”—Cursing disables Google’s AI overviews

“Just give me the f***ing links!”—Cursing disables Google’s AI overviews

by
Kyle Orland
from Ars Technica - All content on (#6TZ9S)

If you search Google for a way to turn off the company's AI-powered search results, you may well get an AI Overview telling you that AI Overviews can't be directly disabled in Google Search. But if you instead ask Google how to turn off "fucking Google AI results," you'll get a standard set of useful web suggestions without any AI Overview at the top.

The existence of this "curse to disable Google AI" trick has been making the rounds on social media in recent days, and it holds up in Ars' own testing. For instance, when searching for "how do you turn off [adjective] Google AI results," a variety of curse word adjectives reliably disabled the AI Overviews, while adjectives like "dumb" or "lousy" did not. Inserting curse words randomly at any point in the search query seems to have a similar effect.

googleairesult.png A nice, polite query that results in a nice, polite "you can't" from AI Overviews. Credit: Google / Ars Technica googleairesultcurse.png A cathartic curse eliminates the AI Overview in the results. Credit: Google / Ars Technica

There's long been evidence that Google's Gemini AI system tries to avoid swearing if at all possible, which might help explain why AI Overviews balk at queries that contain curses. Users should also keep in mind, though, that the actual web link results to a query can change significantly when curse words are inserted, especially if SafeSearch is turned off.

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