Google’s AI and Its Quirky Challenges with Made-Up Idioms

Learning a new language often involves tackling idioms that can bewilder even the most skilled speakers. Take British English for example; phrases like “raining cats and dogs” or “Bob’s your uncle” immediately come to mind.

But Google’s AI, tasked with interpreting these phrases, falls short when faced with nonsensical idioms, highlighting its struggles.

In practice, we have fun asking it to make sense of absurd phrases, such as “Never cook a processor next to your GPU.” Surprisingly, it has tried to link such sayings to hardware bottlenecking.

For example, when prompted, Google’s AI overview explained, “The saying […] humorously emphasizes not pairing a weak CPU with a powerful GPU for a seamless gaming experience.”

However, another attempt suggested it referred to a heating method for GPUs that is now discredited.

As language models depend on patterns to generate responses, they may often vary in their outputs, revealing AI’s unreliability as a reference tool. Despite Google’s attempts to clarify its algorithms, amusing and absurd explanations continue to surface, demonstrating the ongoing challenges AI faces in understanding context and nuance in language.