Iona Wolfe/BAFTA via Getty Images/Futurism
When you let automated systems distribute news, especially on sensitive topics, disaster strikes.
The latest case: how Google’s automated news alerts accidentally fueled an already hurtful racial slur controversy, which came to a head at the Bafta awards this weekend.
As deadline informedGoogle issued a notification linking to an article titled, “How Tourette’s resulted in a BAFTA Film Award.” The problem was the message accompanying the notification, which prompted readers to “See more on N****rs.”
This mistake went viral after Instagram influencer Danny Price posted a screenshot warning his followers, calling it “absolute nonsense”.
“What an interesting Black History Month this has become,” Price wrote.
After the incident received news coverage, Google apologized for the insult.
A spokesperson told media outlets, “We are very sorry for this mistake. We have removed the offending notification and are working to prevent it from happening again.”
Obviously, error inspired heated discussions Online about the irresponsibility of allowing AI systems to report and repackage news. But Google claims that no AI was involved in this mistake.
In the explanation given by deadline After originally reporting that the notification was AI-generated, Google told the newspaper that its systems “recognized a euphemism for an offensive word on multiple web pages, and mistakenly applied the offensive word to the notification text.”
“This system error does not involve AI,” the company stressed. “Our security filters did not kick in properly, which caused this.”
Nonetheless, criticisms of the entry of AI into journalism are not unreasonable. When Apple launched an AI feature summarizing headlines in 2024, it falsely told users that Luigi Manione had shot himself, and other lies, leading to BBC Filing a formal complaint against the tech giant after the tool repeatedly deleted his stories. Last December, Washington Post Deployed an AI-generated feature to create personalized podcasts that summarized its stories, which immediately invented quotes and misrepresented them, along with other mistakes.
Google, whose non-chatbot models are notorious for causing outrageous hallucinations, has itself been guilty of similar blunders. Last month, its Google Discover feed was caught showing users a sensational AI-generated headline that replaced the publication’s original headline, The Verge found.
More on Google: Google’s AI insists that the next year is not 2027
