I am more than a little furious. We live in times when far right agitators are stirring up physical violence, and people are getting sucked into internet rabbit holes of conspiracist thinking and outright lies. But, if you wanted to check the facts about something, where else would you turn but to Google, the default search for, well, pretty much everyone.
So, what happens if you have heard rumours on Facebook, or wherever, that council tenants are being evicted in order to house asylum seekers? What happens if you search something like ‘evicting council tenants for asylum seekers’?
This. This is what happens. This is the google AI summary at the top of the page.
Just in case anyone reading this doesn’t have an inkling of the relevant law, this is horseshit of the highest order. It is absolutely untrue that council tenants can be evicted in order to house asylum seekers (fn 1). It is not a ‘complex issue with legal and ethical considerations’, it is a non-existent issue because it cannot legally happen.
But people have been searching this, and searching for it in their area. You can see from the search auto complete drop down. And they are going to read this nonsense. And many of them are going to believe it.
Oh yes, sure, you and I know that LLM AIs generate false output all the time and have to be checked. Aren’t we the clever ones. But when lawyers are putting hallucinated cases in submissions, and people are falling in love with their AI chatbots, and passing their degrees with no reading but a few prompts, there can be no smugness, no ‘oh of course it does that’.
And when it does something positively dangerous like this, we have to acknowledge the outright risk that lies in apparently confirming a far right fabulation at the top of a google search. This is quite some way beyond telling you to put glue on your pizza on the scale of hazard.
We are heading into very dangerous territory. This is merely a housing law example of it. But it is very frightening. And it is hard to see how to stop it.
[Update 25/07/2025. I have been told that the same search now returns an AI summary saying that such evictions do not happen and citing this post as the source. So the only way to correct such a dangerous error is to have a website considered as authoritative by Google and explicitly describe why the previous summary is wrong. This is not really a workable solution!]
fn 1. With one extremely limited exception. Homeless applicants housed in council properties under ‘non-secure tenancies’ can have their tenancy ended pretty much at the whim of the council, though the council would have to rehouse them. Quite why the council would do this when it is screamingly desperate for all the homeless temporary accommodation it can get is another question, but technically, it could happen. It just doesn’t in reality.