Google’s artificial intelligence system is under fire after it promoted a fake story that rapper Eminem performed at Jeff Bezos’s mother’s funeral and that Tesla CEO Elon Musk attended, Daily Mail can reveal.
The false information was presented by Google’s AI search results for the funeral last week – days before the real service took place – without either the rapper or the Amazon boss’s rival for world’s richest man.
Bezos’s mother Jackie died on August 14 in her Miami-area home age 78 after a long battle with Lewy Body Dementia.
A small, private service was held at the Caballero Rivero Westchester funeral home in West Miami on Friday.
Bezos, 61, and his new wife Lauren Sanchez, 55, were photographed arriving hand-in-hand at the intimate ceremony, where they were joined by other members of the Bezos family.
But according to a Google AI Overview generated on August 21 about the funeral, ‘The service was attended by family, friends, and notable figures, with reports of unexpected appearances by Elon Musk and Eminem, who reportedly delivered a moving tribute.’
Listed in the ‘key details about the event’ was the suspect claim that ‘Eminem sang his 2005 hit “Mockingbird” at the service’.
The song, which was famously dedicated to the rapper’s daughter Hailie, is considered ‘possibly the least offensive Eminem song ever’, according to Genius.com, however, it’s still hardly an appropriate choice for a funeral.
Google released its AI Overview feature on the search engine last year that gives users a summary of information around the web for queries, popping up ahead of all the actual Google search results on the page.
But experts have warned that readers are placing too much trust in the computerized summary, which can ‘hallucinate’ and source information from fake news sites.
A Google spokesperson told Daily Mail the ‘vast majority of AI Overviews are high quality and meet our high bar for helpfulness and accuracy’.
One of the apparent fake sources of the funeral misinformation was suspect site ‘BBCmovie.cc’, which uses a similar name to the internationally respected media organization the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).
Google’s own web browser identifies the site as a potential security threat, warning that visiting it ‘is not private’ and ‘attackers might be trying to steal your information from bbcmovie.cc’.
A Facebook post linking to the site even had fake AI-generated photos of Tesla CEO Musk with his hand on sobbing Bezos’ shoulder, dressed in black inside what appears to be a church.
The Facebook post was by a page for a supposed Saudi Arabian interior design firm called Svaycha Decor.
It shared the outlandish story and other AI-generated images of Elon Musk with suspicious headlines.
The post then shot up Google’s search rankings and appears to have been used by its AI providing a summary.
On August 20 another site posted an extensive, dramatic, and completely fabricated story about Eminem’s supposed performance at the funeral.
The site, which posts viral stories and many NBA-related news entries, is called ‘av.colofandom.com’.
It claimed the rapper was wearing a ‘black suit, knit beanie pulled low, dark sunglasses’.
‘Whispers rippled through the room. The man removed his sunglasses. It was Eminem,’ the dramatic article said.
‘He nodded to the pianist. The first notes of Mockingbird floated through the air – slower, softer, almost fragile.’
Over the weekend Google’s AI had updated the information to read: ‘Jackie Bezos’s funeral was held at the Caballero Rivero Westchester funeral home in Miami, Florida, a private service attended by her family and close friends, including Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez.’
Representatives for Bezos, Musk and Eminem did not respond to Daily Mail’s requests for comment.
The real funeral was confirmed to be on Friday, two days after the fake Eminem story was posted on the ‘colofandom’ site, when Bezos and his wife were photographed by TMZ arriving in a black SUV and entering a funeral home in West Miami.
Both were dressed all in black.
The site reported that Bezos’s brother Mark and stepfather Mike were also at the service, which was said to have had fewer than 50 attendees.
Experts have been warning about misinformation arising from AI’s effect on searching the web.
Jessica Johnson, a senior fellow at McGill University’s Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy, told Canadian broadcaster CBC this month: ‘As a journalist and as a researcher, I have concerns about the accuracy.
‘It’s one of those very sweeping technological changes that has changed the way we […] search, and therefore live our lives, without really much of a big public discussion,’ Johnson said.
University of Washington professor Chirag Shah, who specializes in AI and online search, warned that ‘no checking’ is done once the program generates results.
‘What if those documents are flawed?’ Shah asked CBC. ‘What if some of them have wrong information, outdated information, satire, sarcasm?’
But the Google spokesman said: ‘Just like other features in Search, issues can arise when there is an absence of high quality information on the web on a particular topic, and we use these examples to improve AI Overviews broadly.’
They added that the AI had been corrected, that mistakes can happen amid billions of searches a day, and that their systems learn from errors.
Bezos’s mother ‘died peacefully’, according to an online post from her charity, the Bezos Scholars Program.
‘A quiet final chapter to a life that taught all of us, friends and family alike, the true meaning of grit and determination, kindness, and service to others,’ the organization wrote.
Bezos posted a tribute on Instagram saying ‘She always gave so much more than she ever asked for.’
‘She pounced on the job of loving me with ferocity, brought my amazing dad onto the team a few years later, and then added my sister and brother to her list of people to love, guard, and nourish,’ he wrote.
‘For the rest of her life, that list of people to love never stopped growing.’