Popular Canadian Singer Says Gig Canceled After Google AI Wrongly Labeled Her Sex Pest

Prominent Canadian rapper Ashley MacIsaac says she was falsely labeled as a sex offender by Google’s AI Overview feature, leading concert organizers to cancel a gig last week.

Before we continue, I’m going to need you to watch the music video for “Sleepy Maggie” by Ashley MacIsaac (with Scottish Gaelic lyrics by Mary Jane Lamond). I’m not from Canada where this song hit in 1995, I’ve never been treated to this lavish deal of 90s images and sounds before today, but that direction has been corrected thanks to this news event. For best results, light a clove cigarette before pushing the game:

However, according to an article in The Globe and Mail on Tuesday, the young man in the video with the fiddle, Ashley MacIsaac, was preparing to perform in the community of Sipekne’katik First Nation in central Nova Scotia when the organizers suddenly backed out, apparently after learning that MacIsaac had a felony record of sexual assault and “internet use.”

It later emerged, said MacIsaac, that these editors saw the Google AI Overview result that mixed MacIsaac’s history with another, more gruesome, MacIsaac, also from eastern Canada.

You probably remember the controversy about the Google AI Overviews feature from back in 2024, when it first started, and it quickly became a joke after telling people to put glue on pizza and stuff. For my part, I gave the feature six months to develop before reviewing it, and I found a bunch of weird types of errors that were still common in what I believed were reasonable simulations of real-world use cases. Google told me at the time that it “has work to do on the quality side of things.”

If MacIsaac’s character is good, it still is, and we really need to avoid making mistakes such as those alleged here. There is an exclusive quote in the Globe and Mail from Clifton van der Linden, an assistant professor at McMaster University who has researched AI misinformation. “We are seeing a change in search engines from navigators to narrators,” he told the newspaper.

An overview of AI is text snippets, a type of chatbot-like responses that are created to order when a term is searched on Google, and are based on anything Google can find on the Internet that appears to be related to the topic you are looking for. You never know how someone might say a search about you, because the possibilities are endless, and because of that, you never know what AI Overview might go wrong.

MacIsaac wonders to the Globe and Mail if other people have Googled him, and seen the same results without telling him. You see this as something that could be a cause for concern, because you think that you might lose your job, or find an enemy who believed what you read and decided to hurt him.

For what it’s worth, Google spokeswoman Wendy Manton told the Globe and Mail the following: “Search, including AI Overview is dynamic and often changes to show the most useful information. When problems arise – such as when our features misinterpret web content or miss some context – we use those examples to improve our systems, and may take action under our policies.” The newspaper also claims that Google “edited the artist’s search results.”

Also, a community representative from the Sipekne’katik First Nation told MacIsaac that “We deeply regret the damage this mistake has caused to your reputation, your health, and your sense of personal safety,” and told him he was welcome to perform there in the future, he says. The Globe and Mail did not respond to a request for comment from the Sipekne’katik First Nation.

All of this sounds like too much trouble for most people to get past the visual perception of AI. But hey, at least I read about “Sleepy Maggie.”