Normally I don’t have a lot of time for people who complain that true but unflattering things about them can be easily Googled (we don’t edit Hitler out of the war footage because it makes his family feel bad), but the key word there is true. Because while it’s one thing to have to wear something bad or stupid that you actually did, it’s quite another to have Google itself straight up inventing awful things about you and presenting them as authoritative facts.
Ashley MacIsaac has been a popular Maritime musician for 30 years.
The renowned fiddler was set to perform a concert in Shubenacadie, N.S., this Friday night, but was forced to cancel.
“The chief messaged back and said, ‘We can’t have you in our community due to your past criminal convictions,’’’ and I thought, ‘What are they talking about? I got arrested once for smoking marijuana,’” says MacIsaac.The offences they were referring to included internet luring and sexual assault.
An apparent Google search using AI, which has now been corrected, recently described the popular fiddler as a criminal sex offender.
But the sex offender was another man with the last name MacIsaac.Cyber experts say incidents like these are known as “AI confabulations”
“Anybody that shares a name with anyone could be a victim of this kind of AI confabulation, where it takes information and combines it together. And this is a great example of how dumb AI actually is,” says David Shipley, CEO of Beauceron Security.
“All it is, is a parrot. It just repeats information it encounters. It has no sense for what the truth is or what reality is, and it is causing massive harm. Google, OpenAI, Meta and others that have rolled out this technology in an incredibly irresponsible way, are directly responsible for this mess today, and Mr. MacIsaac’s case is not in isolation.”
I can’t tell you how refreshing it is to hear someone say that last bit out loud in a mainstream news setting, because it’s something people need to hear. AI, for all the good it can do and in spite of all the flashy crap it does to impress people, is both incredibly dangerous and incredibly dumb, and has been deployed in a stunningly reckless manner. The people doing that deploying don’t even fully understand how it works. That’s bad, and it’s only going to get worse.