By now, it’s common knowledge that Google’s AI search can be… unreliable. Back in 2024, the world’s most popular search engine famously recommended that people put glue on pizza. But that was two years ago. Surely Google’s AI has improved since then, right? Especially given their big push for “AI-powered interactive experiences” at this year’s I/O conference, an effort no doubt funded by billions of dollars and overseen by some of the planet’s smartest people.

As it turns out, Google’s AI search still struggles with what seem like the most basic issues. Just last week, you couldn’t search for the word “disregard”; if you did, Google would take you literally, and patiently wait until you entered a “real” query. That bug has since been fixed, but now there’s one that’s even more nonsensical, and all you need to do to trigger it is ask a seemingly obvious question: How many days of the week have a fish in them?

I asked Google that question several times, and I got a different answer every single time. Only once did I get the right response, that no day of the week contains the word “fish” in its name. But other times, that question was apparently too much for Google’s billion-dollar algorithms, and they returned some real doozies.

For what it’s worth, a search for “Saturfish” returns no matches in Google’s traditional web search.

I’m pretty sure that every single one of my English teachers would disagree with you, Google.

Can someone tell Google the meaning of the word “literal”? Also, which “classic riddle” is Google talking about here? There are countless fish riddles, puns, and dad jokes — e.g., “What’s a fish’s least favorite day of the week? Fry Day!” — but I couldn’t find one that’s specifically about fish and days of the week. (Let me know if there is one.)

Here, I thought that Google might mean there’s a fish called “thurs” or “thur,” hence the bit about a “literal fish in its name.” But according to Google’s traditional search, there’s no fish with that name. However, a search for "thurs" fish did reveal that Thursday was a government-mandated “Fish Day” in Russia while a search for "thur" fish revealed that the Thur is a fishing spot in the Alsace region of France. So maybe that’s where Google gets some of this stuff.

But “Thursday” as “thirst-day,” which might make you want to drink like a fish? That’s a definite stretch.

Again with “literally” and the “classic” puns! The bit about eating fish on Friday (e.g., Lenten fish fries) is a nice try, though, and I appreciate the offer for restaurant recommendations and fish recipes. (On a side note, my wife has some fantastic salmon recipes that we enjoy throughout the summer.)

Don’t tell me that Google, creator of an extremely popular online calendar tool used by individuals and organizations around the world, forgot about Sunday and Saturday.

I’m sure Google will fix this particular glitch tout de suite. Even so, it’s both humorous and alarming that Google’s AI didn’t just return an absurd answer; it returned a different absurd answer every single time I asked my question. Which just goes to show that artificial intelligence is not actually intelligent. It doesn’t “comprehend,” “know,” or “understand” anything in the true sense of those words.

Rather, AI is just a really powerful and sophisticated pattern matching machine that only returns best guesses about what it “thinks” your query means. But AI doesn’t understand true meaning, not really. For all of its technical achievements, AI doesn’t understand that nonsense is still nonsense even if it happens to perfectly match a certain linguistic or information pattern.