Prominent Canadian fiddler Ashley MacIsaac says he was wrongly branded a convicted sex offender by Google\u2019s AI Overview feature, leading concert organizers to cancel a gig last week.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Before we continue, I\u2019ll need you to watch the music video for \u201cSleepy Maggie\u201d by Ashley MacIsaac (with Scottish Gaelic vocals by Mary Jane Lamond). Not being from Canada where this song was a hit in 1995, I had never been treated to this sumptuous feast of 90s imagery and sounds before today, but that oversight has been corrected thanks to this news event. For best results, light up a clove cigarette before pushing play:<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Anyway, according to an article in The Globe and Mail<\/a> on Tuesday, the guy in that video with the fiddle, Ashley MacIsaac, was preparing to perform at the Sipekne\u2019katik First Nation community in central Nova Scotia when organizers suddenly backed out, apparently having read that MacIsaac had ghastly sounding convictions on his record for sexual assault and \u201cinternet luring.\u201d<\/p>\n It later emerged, MacIsaac says, that these organizers had seen a Google AI Overview result that had mixed up MacIsaac\u2019s biography with some other, much more horrible, MacIsaac, also from eastern Canada.\u00a0<\/p>\n You probably remember the controversy over the Google AI Overviews feature from back in 2024, when it debuted, and\u00a0quickly became a joke<\/a> after telling people to put glue on pizza and such. For my part, I gave the feature six months to improve before reviewing it<\/a>, and found a number of bizarre error types it was still prone to making in what I believed were plausible simulations of real world use cases. Google told me at the time it still had \u201cwork to do on the quality side of things.\u201d<\/p>\n If MacIsaac\u2019s characterization is right, it still does, and it really needs to not make mistakes like the one alleged here. There\u2019s a choice quote in the Globe and Mail from Clifton van der Linden, an assistant professor at McMaster University who has researched AI misinformation. \u201cWe\u2019re seeing a transition in search engines from information navigators to narrators,\u201d he told the newspaper.<\/p>\n AI Overviews are original snippets of text, sort of like chatbot answers made fresh to order when a term gets searched on Google, and they\u2019re derived from whatever Google can find online that seems to relate to the subject you\u2019re searching. You never know how someone might phrase a search about you, because the possibilities are endless, and thus, you never know how the AI Overview might go wrong.<\/p>\n MacIsaac wonders in the Globe and Mail piece if other people had Googled him, and seen similar results without telling him. He views this as a potential cause for concern, because he thinks he may have lost work, or gained an enemy who believed what they read and decided to cause him harm.<\/p>\n For what it\u2019s worth, Google spokesperson Wendy Manton told the Globe and Mail the following: \u201cSearch, including AI Overviews is dynamic and frequently changing to show the most helpful information. When issues arise \u2013 like if our features misinterpret web content or miss some context \u2013 we use those examples to improve our systems, and may take action under our policies.\u201d That newspaper also says Google \u201camended search results for the musician.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Also, a representative from the Sipekne\u2019katik First Nation community told MacIsaac they \u201cWe deeply regret the harm this error caused to your reputation, your livelihood, and your sense of personal safety,\u201d and told him he was welcome to perform there in the future, he says. The Globe and Mail didn\u2019t hear back from Sipekne\u2019katik First Nation when they requested a comment.<\/p>\n This all sounds like a lot of trouble for a lot of people to go through over an apparent AI hallucination. But hey, at least I learned about \u201cSleepy Maggie.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Prominent Canadian fiddler Ashley MacIsaac says he was wrongly branded a convicted sex offender by Google\u2019s AI Overview…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":369624,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,48387,181,507,168,6826,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-369623","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-ai-overviews","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-artificialintelligence","12":"tag-google","13":"tag-search","14":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=369623"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369623\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/369624"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=369623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=369623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=369623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}