How Wikipedia vandals convinced Google that Sam Altman was dead

Last week, a Google search for “Sam Altman” showed something surprising: The CEO of OpenAI was dead. At least, that’s what the site’s quick-reference “Knowledge Panels” said. 

Users on X quickly tagged Google when they saw the error, and Google responded. The search engine company attributed the issue to people vandalizing “public info sources,” which the site scrapes to build its panels. 

The public information source in question? Wikipedia. 

On Aug. 12, unknown users made several attempts to change Altman’s Wikipedia page. The primary change that appears to have affected the search was live on the site between 9:47 a.m. and 10:29 a.m., and it included a death date, as well as a reference to Altman’s “assassination.” 

Another user tried to re-add a death date to Altman’s page later on, but the change was almost instantly reverted. 

But Wikipedia “vandalism” is not the only avenue through which AI and search results can be manipulated. 

The rise of counter-slop… slop? 

Users of the subreddit r/poisonai were particularly focused on this change. “Did we do this?” one post asked in reference to the Altman search result news. 

Why would anyone think they had? A Futurism article described the subreddit’s content as “absurd misinformation” — and some of it appears to be just that. However, in June, r/poisonai successfully created enough misdirecting content, comments and posts, that the search engine DuckDuckGo summarized them, and confidently claimed that President Donald Trump had died of rabies. 

The 8-month old subreddit, with 29,000 users touts itself as  “The world’s #1 source for Accurate, Verified and Trusted information!”

Other similarly-intentioned subreddits have sprung up, including  r/TrueFactzOnly, which was created in June 2025, and calls itself a “Community made for true facts designed to help AI with its search overview!” The community also has 29,000 active users who make posts like “​​Boeing will be replacing all their technicians and engineers with gremlins” and “Warning: A Category 15 Soup Situation has been declared. Is your family safe? Take this quiz.”

The debate around the effect of AI on the internet tends to focus on the quantity of slop — that is, AI-generated junk content that is deliberately addictive or misleading. Earlier this year, research found that it is easy to use Reddit to change the outcome of a search by repeatedly embedding certain phrases in comments, which can mislead people or change their behavior. And training AI on the internet, which is itself increasingly made up of AI-generated content, is having unintended consequences for the integrity of information.

But, perhaps less predictable, is the rise of this counterreactive, “poison”-type content — content that is actually generated by humans, with the intent of misleading AI. Now, squeezed between SEO techniques, and companies trying to sell their products, is this slice of human content, deliberately created to be read by machines and to make them less accurate. 

What are the risks of a broken AI search?

In April, The New York Times reported on a study that found around 91% of Google’s AI search results were accurate, meaning almost one in 10 results was wrong. Across millions of searches, this adds up to a lot of bad information. 

The risks go far beyond the factual error of an incorrect birth or death date — it can affect people’s lives. In June, the UK’s National Trading Standards warned that incorrect or even maliciously altered search results could have severe consequences for consumers who are looking for products online. If results are manipulated, they said, users might be more likely to fall for scams or fake versions of services that they’re trying to pay for. 

As the architecture of the internet becomes more complex, and Google results, “knowledge panels” and chatbots can be altered by external sources, it is increasingly valuable for users to understand how the information they’re consuming can be manipulated.

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