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Testing suggests Google's AI Overviews tell millions of lies per hour
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2026
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I work in a 911 dispatch center, one time I had someone from the police in one town, let's call it Townsville, trying to get ahold of an officer from another town in our county, Citysburg.
I go to put a phone call request in for them, and ask what it's regarding, and they say it's about an incident that happened at the Mega Lo Mart in Citysburg.
There is no Mega Lo Mart in Citysburg, but there are a couple in nearby towns, some of them have Citysburg mailing addresses, or people might casually say that they're in Citysburg because they don't really know where the borders are, this is pretty common and we deal with it a lot, so I ask if they have the address to make sure that I'm getting them in contact with the police department that actually covers that store.
They spit out an address like 123 Main St in East Jabip
East Jabip isn't in our county, I'd never even heard of that town before. I punch it into Google maps, it's like 2 or 3 hours away from us and sure enough there is a Walmart at that address there.
So to make sure I wasn't missing something, I asked why they wanted to speak with Citysburg police if the incident happened in East Jabip.
And they reply "yeah, I'd never heard of east Jabip either, so I punched the address into Google and the AI told me that it was in Citysburg"
Just blatantly false, AI-hallucinated bullshit.
And our cops (or their office staff, can't remember who exactly it came from) just blindly believed it and didn't bother to verify it at all.
And Citysburg isn't some nowhere town, we're a fairly dense suburban county, these two towns are maybe about a 20 minute drive from each other if traffic cooperates, and Citysburg is our county seat, cops from all over the county are there all the time for court and such and the surrounding areas, they should know that area at least well enough to know that East Jabip isn't there
And they even admitted that it didn't sound right to them, but they still went ahead with it and didn't question the AI.
And luckily this wasn't for anything too urgent, it was for credit card fraud or something along those lines. But actual emergencies get called into us all kinds of bass-ackwards ways like someone in another state calls their mom who lives here who calls her local police who transfer her to us so that we can transfer her to the police where the person who's actually having an emergency is.
That kind of stuff happens pretty frequently by the way, that's not some bullshit scenario I'm making up, I get that probably on a weekly basis.
And so it burns me up thinking that if there had been an actual emergency, having to sort out this bullshit could have caused delays in getting help to someone who needed it because someone outsourced their thinking to a shitty AI
Thank you for giving us so much insight and taking the time to explain the background! I haven't even considered this kind of scenario, I mean this sounds like a patter and something that might even increase as more people rely on bad AI. Can you maybe raise this issue with a higher up office? Also thank you for the important work you are doing, if I had an emergency, I would hope somebody considerate like you is on the other end! :)
It hasn't become a pattern yet, at least not in my area, but I'm sure it's not gonna be the last call I handle where bad AI info is gonna be a problem somehow
I did mention it to my supervisor, and did my best to politely and professionally chew the cop out for blindly trusting the AI search results.
We've already had plenty of experience sorting out issues where addresses and such that people got from Google maps or whatever don't match up with reality, but we're pretty good at catching that kind of stuff and figuring it out.
As far as getting calls passed along to us in weird ways, unfortunately I think the only solution for that is for people to just suck it up and call 911 on their own instead of calling their mom. With a few exceptions for VoIP phones and such, if you call 911, it's going to your local dispatch center wherever you're located, and we hopefully have some kind of approximate location for you. The amount of times I've had to play 20 questions with a 3rd party caller who has no clue about what's going on for something I could have cleared up in about 30 seconds if someone had just called themselves is pretty insane.
And even if you do have to be that 3rd party making a call for someone somewhere else, calling 911 is probably going to be your fastest way to get there. It can be weirdly hard to find a good number for local police sometimes, but most 911 centers have access to some database or service to find the right contact info faster than you probably would googling it (I've gotten calls come into me for towns in other states or even other countries, because they had the same or similar names to ones in our area, and the caller didn't double check that they were calling for the right Townsville)
Although, I will say, some 911 centers are pretty terrible. One that borders my county has a bad habit of transferring any calls for something that isn't in their area to us, either because they didn't bother to verify the location, or because they just can't be bothered to look up the information themselves and they know we'll do it for them. Occasionally they even transfer us calls that they should have kept themselves and I have to transfer a really frustrated caller back to them.
That's another thing my higher-ups are aware of and working on.
Boomers have some of the highest lead levels of any currently living generations. They are also, on average, very gullible. Them holding positions of power, during genAI startup, is why ICE was arresting citizens, with multiple forms of ID, because an app told them the person was someone else. They are told to believe the tech and they don't question it because they don't question anything someone with authority tells them.
As much as I'm happy to blame boomers
The youngest boomers are in their 60s now, not too many of them are out working as any kind of field agent. Most of those assholes out there now are Gen X, Millennials, or even Gen Z.
There have been some changes under this administration, and I don't know what the current "rules" are (as if they care about following rules anyway) but I know at one point there was actually a mandatory retirement age for federal LEOs, and I'm pretty sure it was at about 55 or 60, so under those old rules you couldn't be an ice agent as a boomer. Some probably hung around in admin positions and such, and since the rule changes I'm sure a couple have come out of retirement, but I'm pretty confident that that's a vast minority.
The issues with not questioning authority, gullibility, tech-illiteracy, etc. remain though.