In what scientists are calling “a completely predictable disaster,” Google’s AI Overviews feature has been enthusiastically assuring users that SCP Foundation creatures — the gloriously terrifying monsters dreamed up by collaborative horror fiction writers on the internet — are genuine, documented entities that absolutely exist in the real world. Sleep tight!
For the uninitiated, the SCP Foundation is a wildly creative online fiction project where volunteer writers craft chilling files about fictional supernatural creatures and anomalies, formatted to look like classified government documents. It’s fan fiction. Delightful, nightmare-inducing fan fiction. The kind where a statue that only moves when you blink (SCP-173, for the fans at home) is presented as a “contained threat” rather than, you know, someone’s very vivid imagination.
Google’s AI, apparently skipping the part of its training where it learned to distinguish “spooky made-up wiki” from “verifiable reality,” has been serving up confident, authoritative summaries presenting these fictional horrors as factual information. Users searching for SCP entities have reportedly received AI-generated overviews that treat the Foundation’s clinical fictional formatting at face value — because nothing says “trustworthy search engine” like being earnestly warned about a sentient vending machine from a horror writing community.
This isn’t Google’s first rodeo with AI Overview embarrassments. The feature has previously suggested users eat rocks for minerals and glue cheese to pizza, so in fairness, validating the existence of world-ending eldritch abominations is perhaps a lateral move rather than a step down.
The SCP community, for its part, is likely equal parts flattered and horrified — which, honestly, is exactly how they’d want you to feel.
Google has not yet confirmed whether it plans to update its AI to understand the concept of fiction, but users are advised to maybe double-check before calling their local government to report a reality-bending anomaly in their neighborhood.
*Source: Futurism.com via Reddit r/offbeat*
Original story via Reddit Offbeat
