Prominent Canadian fiddler Ashley MacIsaac says he was wrongly branded a convicted sex offender by Google’s AI Overview feature, leading concert organizers to cancel a gig last week.
Before we continue, I’ll need you to watch the music video for “Sleepy Maggie” 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:
Anyway, according to an article in The Globe and Mail on Tuesday, the guy in that video with the fiddle, Ashley MacIsaac, was preparing to perform at the Sipekne’katik 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 “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 some other, much more horrible, MacIsaac, also from eastern Canada.
You probably remember the controversy over the Google AI Overviews feature from back 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 before reviewing it, 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 “work to do on the quality side of things.”
If MacIsaac’s characterization is right, it still does, and it really needs to not make mistakes like the one alleged here. There’s a choice quote in the Globe and Mail from Clifton van der Linden, an assistant professor at McMaster University who has researched AI misinformation. “We’re seeing a transition in search engines from information navigators to narrators,” he told the newspaper.
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’re derived from whatever Google can find online that seems to relate to the subject you’re 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.
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.
For what it’s worth, Google spokesperson Wendy Manton told the Globe and Mail the following: “Search, including AI Overviews is dynamic and frequently changing to show the most helpful information. When issues arise – like if our features misinterpret web content or miss some context – we use those examples to improve our systems, and may take action under our policies.” That newspaper also says Google “amended search results for the musician.”
Also, a representative from the Sipekne’katik First Nation community told MacIsaac they “We deeply regret the harm this error 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 says. The Globe and Mail didn’t hear back from Sipekne’katik First Nation when they requested a comment.
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 “Sleepy Maggie.”
