What happened

Claudio Zorzi, a renown specialist in orthopedics and traumatology, was said by Google's AI Overviews service of having died. He was actually in good health, but the false rumour resulted in the hospital being inundated with phone calls from concerened patients after the false news spread.

The false rumour forced his employer, the IRCCS Sacro Cuore Don Calabria of Negrar (Verona) to deny it and issue a formal legal warning against Google on the basis that the company's technology had severaly damaged Zorzi's image and the hospital's reputation.

The hospital "formally warned and urged Google to proceed with the immediate and definitive rectification and deletion of the false news of Professor Zorzi's death from all Google services, including 'AI Overview', search results, cached pages, and any other index". 

It also said it would "take legal action in the competent courts, including urgently, to obtain the coercive removal of the harmful content. The hospital also reserves every possibility to take separate action to obtain compensation for all patrimonial and non-patrimonial damages suffered due to the unlawful conduct."

Why it happened

Zorzi was mistaken for a family doctor with the same name who had died in Trentino, leading the AI service to generate inaccurate responses to search queries.