The Hallucination HQ
AI news that's actually fun to read — 2026-05-14
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Today's Hallucination HQGoogle's AI Is Your Accidental Personal Publicist
Google's AI Overview has been cheerfully handing out real people's phone numbers to strangers — without permission, without warning, and apparently without any straightforward opt-out. One man spent a month fielding calls from people hunting for a lawyer, having been mistakenly surfaced as one by Google. He is not a lawyer. Privacy experts are alarmed. Google, presumably, is looking into it. Your number may already be someone else's search result.
Source: MIT Technology Review
Notion Decides Your Workspace Needed More Tenants
Notion has launched a developer platform letting teams wire AI agents, external data sources, and custom code directly into their workspace. Translation: your project management app is now also a small software ecosystem, whether you asked for one or not. The move plants Notion firmly in "agentic productivity" territory — a phrase that means AI does tasks on your behalf, presumably while you stare at your growing list of integrations and feel calm.
Source: TechCrunch
America Wins AI Race — At Least the Part Involving Money
A widely-shared analysis argues the US leads the global AI race not just in research, but in commercialisation — turning models into products people actually pay for. China builds impressive things; Europe regulates impressive things; America sells impressive things. With US firms dominating enterprise AI contracts and the startup funding landscape, the argument holds reasonable weight. "Winning where it matters most" is doing some heavy lifting in that headline, but the underlying data is genuinely hard to dismiss.
Source: Hacker News
Zuckerberg Introduces Private AI Chat, With Absolutely No Notes
Meta has launched Incognito Chat, which Mark Zuckerberg describes as "the first major AI product where there is no log of your conversations stored on servers." The privacy pitch is real — messages aren't saved, and Meta says even it can't read them. Whether you find it reassuring that the company which spent years as a cautionary tale about personal data is now your privacy champion is, perhaps, a matter of personal philosophy.
Source: The Verge
Alexa Has Opinions About Your Shopping Cart Now
Amazon has rolled out Alexa for Shopping, an AI assistant baked into the search bar across mobile, desktop, and Echo Show displays. It offers personalised recommendations, handles comparisons, and works across Amazon and other retailers — which is a generous gesture from a company that would, all things considered, prefer you never leave its website. Voice and touch enabled, it aims to make buying things faster. In fairness, Amazon's checkout was already doing a solid job of that.
Source: TechCrunch
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The AI industry: doing incredible things with data, occasionally including your phone number.
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