Prominent Canadian musician says his concert was canceled after Google AI wrongly labeled him a sex parasite

Prominent Canadian violinist Ashley MacIsaac claims he was wrongly labeled a convicted sex offender by Google’s AI Overview feature, leading concert organizers to cancel a concert last week.

Before we continue, I need you to watch the music video for “Sleepy Maggie” by Ashley MacIsaac (featuring 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 sights and sounds before today, but that oversight has been corrected thanks to this current event. For best results, light a clove cigarette before starting playback:

Anyway, according to a report in Tuesday’s Globe and Mail, the guy in that video with the violin, Ashley MacIsaac, was preparing to perform in the Sipekne’katik First Nation community in central Nova Scotia when organizers suddenly backed out, apparently after reading that MacIsaac had gruesome convictions on his record for sexual assault and “internet luring.”

It later emerged, MacIsaac says, that these organizers had seen a Google AI Overview result that had mixed up MacIsaac’s biography with another, much more gruesome MacIsaac, also from eastern Canada.

You probably remember the controversy surrounding the Google AI Overviews feature in 2024 when it debuted, and quickly became a joke after telling people to put glue on pizza and such. For my part, I gave the feature six months to improve it before seeing him againand discovered a number of bizarre types of errors that he was still likely to make in what I believed to be plausible simulations of real-world use cases. Google told me at the time that it still had “work to do on the quality side.”

If MacIsaac’s characterization is correct, it still is, and he really shouldn’t be making mistakes like the one alleged here. There’s an interesting quote in the Globe and Mail from Clifton van der Linden, an assistant professor at McMaster University who has conducted research on AI misinformation. “We are seeing a transition of search engines from browsers of information to storytellers,” he told the newspaper.

AI previews are original snippets of text, much like chatbot responses cooked to order when a term is searched on Google, and they are derived from anything Google can find online that appears to relate to the topic you are searching for. You never know how someone might phrase a search about you because the possibilities are endless and therefore you never know how the AI ​​insight could go wrong.

MacIsaac wonders in the Globe and Mail article if other people have Googled him and seen similar results without telling him. He sees this as a potential source of worry, as he thinks he may have lost his job or gained an enemy who believed what he read and decided to harm him.

For what it’s worth, Google spokesperson Wendy Manton told the Globe and Mail the following: “Search, including AI previews, is dynamic and changes frequently to display the most useful information. When problems arise – for example if our features misinterpret web content or lack context – we use these examples to improve our systems and may take action in accordance with our policies.” This newspaper also states that Google “has changed search results for Musician.”

Additionally, a community representative from the Sipekne’katik First Nation told MacIsaac, “We deeply regret the harm this mistake has caused to your reputation, your livelihood and your sense of personal safety,” and told him he was welcome to perform there in the future, he said. The Globe and Mail did not receive a response from the Sipekne’katik First Nation when it requested comment.

This all sounds like a lot of trouble to a lot of people because of an apparent AI hallucination. But hey, at least I heard about “Sleepy Maggie.”