How to beat Google AI overviews? Try cursing

Google AI overviews suck ass. I’m talking about the text that Google now displays at the top of the page after we hit enter on a search query.

This is not text that an advanced form of artificial intelligence came up with to satisfy our needs. It’s text that Google’s Gemini AI conjures based on data from some website it deemed useful. Getting data of a website of scientific renown would probably do the trick, but the AI is scraping data off of all sorts of dubious sources.

At worst, the Google AI overview will give you solid advice on how to efficiently end your life while telling you it’s giving you advice on anything else. At best, it gives out the correct information but does so by scraping data off of a website and causing the author of the piece to not get their due click revenue should the text on display suffice to satisfy the user’s curiosity.

For example, if Google happens to scrape Destructoid for an answer to the question “Is Google AI overview good?”, I’d be ok with it because getting Google to display “Google AI overviews suck ass” would be fantastic. Still, the prospective reader could miss out on the chance to read this piece, possibly have a laugh, and convince my overlords to keep on giving me money.

I previously wrote a guide on how to bypass Google’s AI, but there’s a new technique that’s way easier and funnier. Turns out you can do away with Google’s awful AI overviews simply by introducing curse words in your query.

So, instead of asking about the “best time to plant tomatoes”, ask “best f*cking time to plant tomatoes”, or “f*cking best time to plant tomatoes” (Without the *, of course).

As posited by Ars Technica, this might be because Google’s Gemini AI tries to avoid swearing at all costs. Just use your curse words in a way that doesn’t change the meaning of your sentence, and avoid hateful slurs as your profanity hack words of choice, because c’mon. Follow those simple steps, and you’ll be making your experience on the Internet and the Internet itself a better place in the funniest way possible.

So yeah, that’s right — the people who taught you never to curse back when you were a kid either had no idea how weird the world would get one day — or have been on the machines’ side all along.