TL;DR
- Google introduced AI Overviews last year to summarize Search results.
- Their reception has proved controversial at best, with users often looking for ways to disable them.
- Including profanity in your Search query appears to work quite well at immediately turning AI Overviews off.
“Enough with this @!#?@! AI nonsense, already!” With as ubiquitous as artificial intelligence-powered systems have become over the past couple years, and considering how their performance sometimes leaves us a little wanting, it should be no surprise that plenty of people are interested in disabling AI where possible. After Google brought AI Overviews to Search last year, we learned about some tricks for turning AI Overviews off, such as by appending some special characters to the URL in your browser. Now we’re hearing about one that’s damn easy to use, and a lot more damn convenient than fiddling around with your damn address bar: cursing.
The approach could not be simpler: Just drop an f-bomb (or your expletive of choice) or two into your Google Search query, and AI Overviews seem to just vanish. It’s unclear who first spotted this behavior, but Ars Technica reports that it’s been making the rounds on social media this past week.
Sure enough, in our tests we can confirm that inserting some casual profanity into your Search terms flips AI Overviews off like a switch:
It’s difficult to say for sure without some insight from Google, but the prevailing theory here is that the company is trying very hard to avoid its AI systems swearing back at users, and a prompt containing such language is just immediately shut down.
While seemingly effective at accomplishing the goal of reverting Search to its pre-AI behavior, it’s worth keeping in mind that you are potentially coloring the results you get by sprinkling all this blue language into your query — so don’t go acting shocked if a few of the results you get might be a bit spicier than you were anticipating. Or at the very least, be open to the idea of varying the choice of swears you employ in this manner.
