Google appears to have blocked certain artificial intelligence search results for queries about President Donald Trump’s mental acuity, but will provide an AI summary of the same for former President Joe Biden.
When The Independent searched “is trump in cognitive decline,” Google’s AI Overview tool, which automatically appears at the top of any search, displayed a message saying: “An AI Overview is not available for this search.”
Inputting exactly the same query, but for Biden, Google’s AI Overview responds with a summary.
Tech outlet The Verge was the first to report on the apparent discrepancy. The outlet searched the query “does trump show signs of dementia,” which Google’s AI responded with: “An AI Overview is not available for this search.”
When The Independent input the same search, the message no longer appeared.
In Google’s AI Mode tab, the query generated a list of 10 results of news reports on the subject. But in the same mode for Biden, an AI summary response was generated.
When contacted for comment, a Google spokesperson told The Independent its AI Overviews and AI Mode “won’t show a response to every query.”
“Our systems automatically determine where an AI response will be useful, and it’s not always 100 percent consistent,” the spokesperson said. “We don’t show AI Overviews on every query and similarly in AI Mode, for some topics (like current events) we may show a list of links as the response.”
The tech giant’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, was at a White House dinner with the president in early September, where he thanked Trump for his leadership and praised his administration for its “AI Action Plan,” launched in July.
“The AI moment is one of the most transformative moments any of us have ever seen or will see in our lifetimes, so making sure the U.S. is at the forefront — and I think your administration is investing a lot,” Pichai said at the dinner on September 4. “Already the AI action plan under your leadership I think is a great start, and we look forward to working together. And thanks for your leadership.”
The plans, shaped by Silicon Valley billionaires who backed Trump’s election bid, seek to ensure the U.S. innovates the technology “faster and more comprehensively” than its foreign competitors and ensures that it will not involve “Woke AI.”
It comes as YouTube, which is owned by Google, this week agreed to pay $24.5 million to settle a lawsuit from Trump over his suspension from the platform after the January 6 riot.
Trump has dismissed scrutiny about his mental acuity for years, maintaining he is a “stable genius” and boasting about acing simple cognitive tests.
In June he alleged that Biden had “suffered from serious cognitive decline” for years.
