Google’s Gemini video search makes factual error in demo

Google made a lot of noise about its Gemini AI taking over search at its I/O conference today, but one of its most eye-catching demonstrations was once again marred by the ever-present fatal flaw of every major language model to date: confidently create the wrong answer.

During an animated video about “Search in the Age of Gemini,” Google demonstrated video search, which lets you search by speaking during a video clip. The example is a video of a film advance lever stuck on a film camera with the question “why isn’t the lever moving all the way”, which Gemini recognizes and provides some suggestions to fix. Very impressive!

The only problem is that the answers it comes up with are often hilariously bad, and Google literally detached the suggestion to “open the back door and carefully remove the film”, which is perhaps the worst thing you can do in this situation. (If you’re not familiar with how film cameras work, opening the door this way in anything other than a completely dark room would expose your film to light, ruining any photos you took.)