Google AI said to put glue in pizza — so I made a pizza with glue and ate it (2024)

I knew my assignment: I had to make the Google glue pizza. (Don't try this at home! I risked myself for the sake of the story, but you shouldn't!)

I did use Google to make sure that "nontoxic" glue was indeed semisafe to eat. Google's AI answer said that small quantities might lead to an upset stomach but not, say, death. That's good enough for me.

(Since I know you're wondering, yes, I did eat paste as a kid. I loved it. It was minty. I stopped only because of shame from the other first graders. But now I'm an adult and can't be shamed for eating glue pizza.)

I assembled my ingredients from my local grocery store: shredded cheese, marinara sauce, a ball of pizza dough, and, of course, nontoxic school glue (which I already had at home).

OBVIOUS WARNING: DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME. DO NOT EAT GLUE. SERIOUSLY.

And to anyone who feels compelled to point out I shouldn't have used jarred sauce or preshredded cheese: Please … keep in mind I'm eating glue here.

I spread out the dough, now to mix the sauce and glue.

Google said to use 1/8 cup of glue, but not how much sauce. I eyeballed that the pizza would need about 1/2 cup of red sauce.

I had imagined the amount would be more like a "light drizzle" of glue. But 1/8 of a cup is 2 tablespoons, and it looked like quite a bit more than I'd expected.

It came out a nice orange color, like vodka sauce. As I mixed and spread, I didn't notice a significant change in the consistency of the sauce.

Now for the cheese and some fresh basil. Ready for the oven!

I baked it at 450 degrees for 12 minutes, which turned out to be a little too long — it was lightly burned.

When I opened the oven door, I was hit with a blast of steam and fumes, and I momentarily freaked out. I remember that when "NyQuil chicken" was a viral meme, doctors warned that the real danger was lung damage from toxic fumes.

By heating up the chemicals in the glue, would I create some kind of toxic gas?

Well, let's hope not! Here we go!

Finally, the taste test:

My verdict: This wasn't the best homemade pizza I'd had — I couldn't necessarily tell whether the glue was the problem or that the cheap jarred sauce could've used a little more seasoning. (In the marinara's defense, it's hard to complain about taste when you add glue.)

But also … it was kind of OK? I had only a few bites because I was afraid of poisoning myself.

Most importantly: Did the glue keep the cheese from sliding off? You bet it did:

What does this all mean? For me personally, this means that I'm an idiot who eats glue. But what does it mean for Google and the future of AI-powered search?

These goofy AI answers are funny but apparently rare. A Google spokesperson told Business Insider: "The examples we've seen are generally very uncommon queries and aren't representative of most people's experiences. The vast majority of AI Overviews provide high-quality information, with links to dig deeper on the web."

But still: Google AI spits out wild answers often enough that it's reasonable to say that there's a user mistrust of AI-powered answers (for now). The pizza-glue controversy is silly — no one with three brain cells would actually do this — but we can assume that AI also gives answers that are less obviously wrong but still wrong.

It appears that the origin of the pizza glue was a joke made on Reddit 11 years ago about adding glue to sauce. That Google's AI search answers are based on Reddit should largely be a good thing: Reddit is full of useful answers for how to do things and other common quandaries. But Google's AI failed to decipher that this Reddit answer was clearly a joke.

What will this mean for the general public's trust in Google and AI? I'm not sure! This week's OpenAI-Scarlett Johansson debacle probably had a much bigger effect on worries about whether the companies behind AI are operating ethically, regardless of what actually went down.

Presumably, Google AI search results will improve, and these weird flukes of bad results will become increasingly rare. There's a very reasonable concern among a lot of people that "let Google do the Googling for you" will have a very bad effect on the web as we know it. Depriving clicks to the websites that actually provide the information that powers AI results will probably have some unfortunate long-term effects.

If you'd like to hear some more smart thoughts on this, I recommend the most recent episode of the "Search Engine" podcast on this topic. It would be great to listen to as you cook up your own homemade, nonglue pizza.

Lastly, I have to say, once again: DO NOT TRY THIS YOURSELF. DO NOT EAT GLUE PIZZA.