"You Can’t Lick a Badger Twice": Google's AI Is Making Up Explanations for Nonexistent Folksy Sayings

Have you heard of the idiom "You Can’t Lick a Badger Twice?" We haven't, either, because it doesn't exist — but Google's AI seemingly has. As netizens discovered this week that adding the word "meaning" to nonexistent folksy sayings is causing the AI to cook up invented explanations for them. "The idiom 'you can't lick a badger twice' means you can't trick or deceive someone a second time after they've been tricked once," Google's AI Overviews feature happily suggests. "It's a warning that if someone has already been deceived, they are unlikely to fall for the same trick again." Author Meaghan Wilson-Anastasios, who first noticed the bizarre bug in a Threads post over the weekend, found that when she asked for the "meaning" of the phrase "peanut butter platform heels," the AI feature suggested it was a "reference to a scientific experiment" in which "peanut butter was used to demonstrate the creation of diamonds under high pressure." There are countless other examples. We found, fo ... Read full article.