So please correct me, but was Google's AI crawling the web for information without discretion? If so, why wouldn't that totally santorum the AI answers?

All evidence points to yes, and from some of the least trustworthy sources of information on the planet [1].

[1] Glue pizza and eat rocks: Google AI search errors go viral: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd11gzejgz4o