India, June 20 -- In a startling display of technical hallucination, Google's AI Overviews feature has been caught repeatedly presenting gruesome creatures from online horror fan-fiction as documented scientific facts.

The search giant's AI-first interface, which is designed to provide direct answers rather than links, has been found to treat entries from the "SCP Foundation", a massive, collaborative project of fictional horror stories, as legitimate reality. In at least 20 documented instances, the AI described these invented "anomalies" with clinical, authoritative prose, completely omitting any disclaimer that the content is a work of fiction.

'Ed's Head' and Other Fabricated Terrors

When users searched for "SCP-565," the AI Overvi...