What happened

Google’s AI Overviews generated false information stating that Juno Award-winning Canadian musician Ashley MacIsaac had been convicted of various sex crimes and was on a sex offender registry.

The error stemmed from the AI combining the musician’s identity with that of another person with the same surname who had criminal charges, effectively misattributing those charges to the artist.

As a direct consequence, the organisers of a planned December 19 concert at the Sipekne’katik First Nation near Halifax canceled the event after seeing the AI’s summary.

MacIsaac only learned of the allegation when confronted about it and later confirmed the information was false. Google updated the summary after the error was flagged by MacIsaac and the media.

Why it happened

The incident occurred because Google’s AI system automatically synthesised information from web content and erroneously merged data from two distinct individuals. 

Commonly referred to in the industry as an AI “hallucination” or erroneous summarisation, this type of error reflects broader limitations in how large language models contextualise and verify data.