We have it on good authority that next year is not 2027.
That authority, of course, is Google’s horribly inaccurate AI Overview feature.
By now, you’re probably well aware that the search engine’s AI-generated summaries are plagued with hallucinations. But you’d think after years of being unleashed on the unsuspecting public, they might be a little better.
Fat chance, it turns out. Ask Google’s incredibly trustworthy AI model “is 2027 next year,” and you’ll get an answer that inconveniently conflicts with reality.
“No, 2027 is not next year; 2027 is two years away from the current year (2026),” it confidently explains, “meaning next year is 2028, and the year after that is 2027, which is a common year starting on a Friday.” A link icon lists several sources for this claim.
In another instance, Google’s AI says it’s currently 2025.
Clearly, the calendars are all wrong, so we’d recommend making a change to yours: whatever date you marked down for the coming of the singularity, push it way back.
Reddit posts flagging this issue show that the AI Overview has been giving the wrong answer for well over a week. But Google engineers aren’t the only ones who’ll need to confide in their chatbot wives or therapists to cope with the embarrassment: OpenAI’s ChatGPT also struggles when asked if 2027 is next year.
“No 🙂 2027 is not next year,” it asserts (emphasis the AI’s).
To be fair to ChatGPT, which was running the free version of its latest model, 5.2, it does quickly catch its mistake. “Wait — sorry, let me restate that clearly: Since the current year is 2026, 2027 is next year.”
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