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. “It’s a very scary situation where, if I had gone to a border, I probably would have been still in jail,” says MacIsaac. “(I’ve been) a public figure for years and there are stories written about me that are about marijuana and about me being gay, all that stuff…But when it comes to the serious nature of criminal offences, it’s completely false. It’s completely wrong.” MacIsaac says the mistaken identity search spread quickly, and that he is now fighting for his reputation and livelihood. “People that have had a situation in their life where they were assaulted or abused, I’m sure would be triggered by reading such a thing connected to somebody’s name, who might show up on a place card in their town or their community,” he says. Reigniting AI concerns 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.” He says it highlights continued concerns over the use of AI technology. “The particular circumstances here are among the most horrific I have seen so far, but I have seen lots of examples where this tool has made up complete distortions of reality, what we refer to as ‘hallucinations,’ where things that just absolutely did not happen, AI states it with such certainty and assertion and confidence, that it makes people want to believe it. “This is one case, but there are now lawsuits in the United States where we have people who actually died, committed self-harm because of this. We have others who are now alleged to have committed homicide and self-harm associated with delusions caused by these tools. They are dangerous.” Shipley believes local governments need to strengthen defamation laws to protect people from AI mishaps. “Ontario’s legal association has proposed changes to Canada’s defamation laws to challenge some of these disproportion and power imbalances online. We can do something. This isn’t something that we have to wait for Ottawa to do. Although, frankly, I would like to have one single national law of the land that gives every Canadian the right to correct, when this kind of harm happens.” Google’s response A spokesperson with Google reiterated the search result that linked Ashley MacIsaac to the criminal offences no longer appears. “Search, including A-I Overviews is dynamic and frequently changing to show the most helpful information. When issues arise – like if our features misinterpret web content or miss some context – we use those examples to improve our systems, and may take action under our policies,” a Google spokesperson told CTV News in a statement. MacIsaac says he filed a report with Google. “It seemed like things changed in the first day or two. But then they came back and there were more ways you can search (it),” he says. “I want to go on the record to make it clear to people that this is an AI mistake, and that if it comes to it, we will have to go all the way to whatever courts are necessary.”
