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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.
As the lore goes, the SCP Foundation is a non-government organization that collects and contains supernatural discoveries. Writers catalogue these fictional phenomena — which range from the terrifying to the downright bizarre — in the form of fake records, studies, research documents, and logs, all of which are indexed in a sprawling archive.
The key word, of course, is “fake.” Google’s AI Overviews, it turns out, has a bad habit of presenting entities from the expansive SCP universe as real items, events, or beings — blatantly confusing those fabricated studies and records as actual evidence of horrifying or otherworldly happenings.
This is cleanly demonstrated in our Google search for the term “SCP-565,” the SCP code for Ed’s Head. Nowhere in the resulting AI Overview does the large language model-powered search tool acknowledge that Ed’s Head is imaginary; it never refers to fan-fiction, nor does it even mention the word “lore.”
Instead, it presents Ed’s Head as if it’s an actual deep-sea discovery, even pointing us to “official” records for further research.
“Forensics confirmed that SCP-565 belonged to Edward Belltram, who died roughly two years before the anomaly’s initial sighting,” reads the AI summary. “It is safely contained in a secure aquatic enclosure by the SCP Foundation, where it is regularly monitored for mental and physical degradation.”
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