When Google’s AI Overview search feature launched in May, it was generally regarded as a mess. It told people to eat glue and rocks, libeled newsworthy figures, plagiarized journalists’ work, and was so bad Google added a feature to turn it off entirely. In the nearly 10 months since AI Overview launched, it’s still getting things wrong, like telling people that vibrators can be used for childrens’ behavioral therapy.
As discovered by Reddit user clist186, searching for “magic wand pregnancy” returns a bizarre answer about creativity with children as a “fun and engaging” activity alongside an image of a Magic Wand vibrator, one of the most popular and universally recognized sex toys in the world:
“The Magic Wand tool is a creative way for parents to identify behavioral changes they want to make, including those related to pregnancy. It can be used to make assessment fun and engaging, especially for long-time WIC clients. Here's how the Magic Wand tool works:
Parents describe what parenting challenges they would change by ‘waving a magic wand’. The responses of both parents and older children can be used to start discussions. The Magic Wand tool can be purchased online or at a local store.”
Making this even weirder, I don’t get the parenting-related AI Overview result when I search that term, but 404's Emanuel Maiberg (famously, a parent himself) does.
AI Overview, which is powered by Google’s Gemini model, provides links to where the information comes from as part of its results; In this case, it’s summarizing a document from the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services about a thought exercise where a therapist passes clients a “magic wand” that helps them imagine an ideal scenario. This isn’t referring to passing a Hitachi to a child, but the AI doesn’t know that.
In another result for the search term "what is a magic wand," AI Overview pairs a photo of a Magic Wand sex toy with a description of a magician’s trick:
“A magic wand is a small stick used by magicians to perform tricks and make magic happen. It's often short, black, and has a white tip. Magicians use magic wands as part of their misdirection and to make things hap- pen like growing, vanishing, moving, or dis- playing a will of their own. For example, a classic magic trick involves making a bouquet of flowers appear from the wand's tip.”
This Overview result does eventually get around to describing the Magic Wand in question, though: “Magic wand may also refer to a brand of massager: Hitachi Magic Wand. A massaging device that was first listed for business use in 1968 and became available to the public in the 1970s. It's designed to relieve pain and tension, soothe sore muscles and nerves, and aid in rehabilitation after sports injuries.”
In a company blog about AI Overview, Google said the feature uses “multi-step reasoning capabilities” to “help with increasingly complex questions.” The search term “magic wand pregnancy” isn’t particularly complex; most people with basic reading comprehension skills would probably put it together that the term is looking for answers about using one of the world’s most popular sex toys while pregnant. But Gemini took the weirdest route possible instead, pulling from an obscure document about a talk therapy technique that happened to contain the phrases “magic wand” and “pregnancy.”
Searching with a full, natural language query — “can you use a magic wand while pregnant” — returns a more nuanced AI-generated response that considers the searcher might have several different kinds of wands in mind:
Last year, Reddit signed a $60 million per year contract with Google in exchange for licensing users’ content to train Google’s AI models. Adult content, including sex education and conversations about sex toys, are still allowed on Reddit as one of the few platforms that hasn’t banned sex entirely, and pregnancy-related questions are massively popular there. (There are dozens of questions specifically about using vibrators while pregnant.) It makes sense that phrasing the search term as a question rather than a set of keywords would turn up a better response from the AI: it’s what the AI was trained on.
Thankfully, most people searching “magic wand pregnancy” are probably able to use their human brains to deduce that they shouldn’t use a vibrator as a talking stick in group therapy with kids. But it’s yet another example of AI being shoved into every product and tool that adds more work, friction, and confusion to the experience of being online, instead of less — as tech companies constantly promise.
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
