Get better searches by swearing at Google.

How are we teaching the learning-machines to speak? Ars Technica reports on the discovery (or revelation, maybe) that it’s possible to do away with that infuriating, inaccurate AI that attempts to answer your Google searches (but does so very badly) simply by swearing at it:

The existence of this “curse to disable Google AI” trick has been making the rounds on social media in recent days, and it holds up in Ars’ own testing. For instance, when searching for “how do you turn off [adjective] Google AI results,” a variety of curse word adjectives reliably disabled the AI Overviews, while adjectives like “dumb” or “lousy” did not. Inserting curse words randomly at any point in the search query seems to have a similar effect.

There’s long been evidence that Google’s Gemini AI system tries to avoid swearing if at all possible, which might help explain why AI Overviews balk at queries that contain curses. Users should also keep in mind, though, that the actual web link results to a query can change significantly when curse words are inserted, especially if SafeSearch is turned off.

More recently, some Google users have noticed that appending the string “-ai” to a search (without quotes) seems to also turn off AI Overviews in the results. That method has worked in Ars’ testing, as has appending practically any other text string after a minus sign at the end of a search, for some reason.