Behind the Blog: What Is Real?

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss weird fake furniture and shared reality (or the lack thereof).

SAM: It has been such a busy week I forgot it’s Friday until I woke up this morning, so I’ll be brief with a quick couple of thoughts about Google’s AI Overview, which I wrote about serving bizarre results that suggested people pass a Magic Wand vibrator to a child like a talking stick for counseling purposes.

Emanuel found the thread on Reddit where someone posted a screenshot of the result they got with the search term “magic wand pregnancy.” He was getting the same result as that person; I assume both he and OP were doing a lot of Googling about pregnancy related topics, as Emanuel’s wife just had a kid and this person was clearly looking for answers about what sorts of buzz buzz were safe to throw down with while pregnant. When I searched with the same term, I didn’t get that answer, and couldn’t replicate it. I could get the other one mentioned in the story—searching “what is a magic wand” showed me an AI Overview result about magicians’ “small sticks” (ouch) — but not the pregnancy one. I assumed, and mentioned in the story, that this is because of the aforementioned Googling about babies; Google personalizes search based on activity, and parents are a valuable market for advertisers.