Google's AI Overview says Flock cameras hide gold, copper

There is a small, funny, and slightly worrying story out of Futurism this week about what happens when a large language model, a search box, and an internet meme all meet in the same place.

Ask Google 'how much gold does a Flock camera have,' and the AI Overview reportedly answers with a straight face: about 1 to 5 grams of gold in the internal circuit boards and wiring, and anywhere from two to 23 pounds of copper. Futurism points out the obvious problem. A Flock automatic license plate reader weighs about three pounds in total, so 23 pounds of copper stuffed inside one is not a supply chain issue, it is a physical impossibility.

The provenance is the interesting part. The AI's cited sources are, per the reporting, an anonymous Substack post from an account called 'do.not.obey.do.not.comply' quoting a rough scrap value of $150 to $500 per camera based on 'estimates based on scrap-value discussions,' and an AI-generated Instagram post from what appears to be a cannabis-grower account. Neither is a metallurgy report. Both riff on a running joke in privacy-minded corners of the internet that Flock's ALPRs are secretly stuffed with precious metals, a tongue-in-cheek way of egging people on to rip the cameras off the poles.

Why this matters beyond one funny query: Google's AI Overview is the default summary that sits above the blue links for a huge share of searches, and here it laundered an internet meme into what looks like a factual answer, complete with a plausible dollar figure. If the top-of-search summary can be steered by a Substack post and an Instagram meme, the incentive to seed those kinds of sources is now industrial-scale. In this case the payload is a jokey call to vandalize surveillance cameras. Next time it could be a health claim or a stock tip.

The honest caveat is that this is a single query in a single story, Google did not respond to Futurism's request for comment, and the Overview may already read differently by the time you try it. What the reporting does not tell you is whether any Flock devices have actually been damaged as a result, or how an anonymous Substack and a cannabis-grower Instagram post ended up at the top of the retrieval stack in the first place. The forward-looking thing worth watching is not this specific hallucination but the source-quality problem underneath it. As long as AI Overviews weight availability over credibility, expect more of the same, played for laughs one week and something less funny the next.