Google’s AI Overviews Is Telling Users That SCP Horror Fiction Entities Are Real

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If you Google “SCP-565” — an iconic entry in the collaborative fan fiction universe known as the “SCP Foundation” — the company’s AI Overviews describes the nonexistent entity as though it were entirely real, without a single acknowledgement that it’s a piece of online horror fiction.“SCP-565 (also known as ‘Ed’s Head’) is an anomalous, ambulatory human head that behaves like a coral crab (Carpilius convexus),” the AI feature bloviates. “It moves across the seafloor by manipulating exposed, unfurled brain matter as legs and tentacles. DNA and dental records link the anomaly to a deceased man named Edward Belltram.”The AI-generated search summary adds that the entity “navigates using neural tissue that protrudes from a large wound on the back of its skull” and “has been observed scavenging dead fish and living alongside normal crab colonies in ocean reefs.”Of course, there’s no deceased human’s head scuttling around the ocean like a coral crab. Ed’s Head is a made-up “anomaly” among the many fictional “objects, entities, and phenomena” dreamed up by members of the SCP Foundation fandom.