Google Home is hallucinating fictional identities

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Credit: Stephen Schenck / Android Authority


TL;DR

• Google Home users report their cameras describing fictional people.
• One summary said “Michael was seen taking out the trash,” while another labeled a man living alone as “Sarah.”
• If the reports are accurate, a likely possibility is that Gemini on Google Home is hallucinating, rather than intruders or data mix-ups.

With Halloween week upon us, it probably isn’t the best time for your smart home to start suggesting that people you aren’t familiar with have been wandering your property. However, a couple of Reddit users claim their Google Home devices have started describing people they don’t know.

According to a post on the r/googlehome subreddit, a user’s Nest camera described an activity summary saying “Michael was seen taking out the trash,” even though no one by that name lives there. When the user asked about it, Google’s assistant reportedly replied that its camera “can identify faces even if you haven’t explicitly named them,” and that it had spotted “Michael” between October 26 and 27. The user said they’d never entered that name into the system, but the actions described were what he himself had done. He found the response “pretty creepy.”




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