{"id":653468,"date":"2026-05-07T09:51:11","date_gmt":"2026-05-07T09:51:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/653468\/"},"modified":"2026-05-07T09:51:11","modified_gmt":"2026-05-07T09:51:11","slug":"tiktok-is-pulling-back-on-testing-an-ai-feature-that-went-haywire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/653468\/","title":{"rendered":"TikTok Is Pulling Back on Testing an AI Feature That Went Haywire"},"content":{"rendered":"

Did TikTok just have its “glue pizza” moment<\/a>?<\/p>\n

\n Loading audio narration…\n <\/p>\n

The company is pulling back on a new artificial intelligence feature it was testing that went haywire, adding wildly inaccurate AI-generated text summaries to videos from users like Charli D’Amelio, Shakira, and Saturday Night Live.<\/p>\n

These “AI overviews” were designed to provide additional context for a video, recommend similar products to what’s on-screen, and generally explain what was happening. While the tool did a good job summarizing some posts, for others, it hallucinated more than Bryan Johnson did during his livestream mushroom trip<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Here are a few chaotic examples of AI overviews this reporter saw on the app in the past week:<\/p>\n

The AI feature described a video of Charli D’Amelio, sitting alone in front of a white wall and talking directly to the camera, as a “collection of various blueberries with different toppings.”A post from a dog trainer explaining why dogs kick their feet after going to the bathroom was described as “a captivating display of intricate origami art, meticulously folded from a single sheet.”A video from Shakira promoting a new song release, per the AI overview, was “a repetitive sequence of several distinct blue shapes appearing and moving across the screen.”A viral post about feeling heartbroken from a user named Victoria was described as a “mesmerizing close-up of a tiny hand repeatedly tracing intricate patterns on a smooth surface.”A video of Olivia Rodrigo promoting her upcoming appearance on SNL was called a “person’s face being gradually replaced by a random, nonsensical string of letters and numbers.”<\/p>\n

One Reddit user wrote that it was as if the feature would look at a video and then “independently open a different tab and use a random text generator to create a caption.”<\/p>\n

Now, following user feedback, TikTok is pulling back on the test, a company spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider. The AI overview feature has been updated to focus on identifying products in a video rather than describing a video’s full contents, they said.<\/p>\n

The tool, which has been testing for a few months, was available to a limited set of users in the US and a few other markets, the spokesperson said, describing it as an experiment.<\/p>\n

TikTok declined to share which models it used to power its AI overviews, but an in-app description of the feature says it relied on either TikTok’s own AI tech<\/a> or third-party products.<\/p>\n

Seeing hallucinatory AI<\/a> summaries show up in my feed this week felt like a throwback to when ChatGPT and other early AI products regularly made stuff up.<\/p>\n

When Google released its version of AI overviews in 2024, the feature confidently proclaimed that a dog had played in the NHL, for example. It told my coworker Katie Notopoulos to add glue to her pizza to keep the cheese from sliding off.<\/p>\n

While AI tools are getting better at answering some questions \u2014 a recent analysis by the AI firm Oumi found Google’s AI overviews were accurate about 90% of the time \u2014 it felt oddly comforting to see that a technology that doomsdayers predict will wipe out white-collar jobs<\/a> and take over many facets of our lives can still fail in silly and surprising ways.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Did TikTok just have its “glue pizza” moment? Loading audio narration… The company is pulling back on a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":653469,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,242351,53171,276,277,8623,49,48,226342,2539,242347,192,242350,49683,242349,61,1059,5355,32786,1062,242348],"class_list":["post-653468","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-ai-firm-oumi","tag-ai-feature","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-business-insider","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-charli-damelio","tag-company","tag-glue-pizza","tag-google","tag-other-early-ai-product","tag-past-week","tag-similar-product","tag-technology","tag-tiktok","tag-tool","tag-user","tag-video","tag-went-haywire"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653468","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=653468"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653468\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/653469"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=653468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=653468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=653468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}