It’s pretty much unavoidable these days. You need to verify something on the fly, so you search it up and read the AI overview. Last night, for example, I was talking to my friend Daniel about music documentaries. “What’s that documentary about female backup singers for people like Mick Jagger?” I said.
“Twenty Feet from Stardom,” it shot back. Nice. Problem solved.
At the same time, AI Overviews are literally rewriting history and perpetuating falsehoods. While I was working on my book earlier today, I asked it if it could give me an overview of the Mer Rouge incidents in Tulsa in the 1920s. Here’s what it said:
Now, if you don’t know about the Mer Rouge incident in Louisiana, AI can do a decent job of summarizing what happened. To paraphrase the Bots:
In August 1922, armed Ku Klux Klansmen ambushed a carnival caravan near Bastrop, Louisiana, abducting two prominent local critics of the Klan, Filmore Watt Daniel and Thomas F. Richards. The Governor called in the Bureau of Investigation (the early FBI). In December 1922, dynamite explosions set off in nearby Lake Lafourche surfaced the tortured, mutilated bodies of both men, confirming their murders.
Despite overwhelming evidence implicating local Klan leaders a grand jury stacked with Klansmen refused to return indictments, and no one was ever convicted for the crime. Sensationalized national press coverage, federal intervention, and public outrage surrounding the Mer Rouge murders exposed the extreme lawlessness and corruption of the Ku Klux Klan. The brutal incident shocked the nation and ultimately marked the beginning of the Second Klan’s rapid decline across Louisiana and the American South.
Good job, Gemini! Solid sourcing, and accurate overview. Now, did such a thing ever happen in Tulsa? No, no such incidents happened in Tulsa and, furthermore, Google tells me I’m probably mixing it up with the Race Massacre of 1921.
I was going over Oklahoma Governor Jack Walton’s war on the Ku Klux Klan and I found this exchange in an archival folder.
The Grand Titan of the Tulsa Klan in 1923 was a man from Louisiana named Minor Merriweather. At that time, former Klansmen like Buck Lewis and Tate Brady were spilling the tea. They told a military tribunal that Merriweather was killing people in the Tulsa area and they were simply disappearing — just like Mer Rouge.
“If some murder like the Mer Rouge, Louisiana, affair would transpire, and an investigation would start, they would get everybody in trouble,” Buck Lewis said.
“Why”, Merriweather responded, “there has been six of these affairs right here in my province [Tulsa Realm]. There has been nothing done about it.”
Merriweather then went into details, likening the killings to Mer Rouge. “There was one, a soldier over at Drumright; one at Nowata; one east of Claremore; one at Broken Arrow.”
Lewis was shocked. “You never hear anything about it,” Merriweather said. People don’t know a thing.”
Gov. Jack Walton wanted everyone to know that Mer Rouge-style killings were happening right here. Walton’s newspaper printed stories about the killings, and they made their way into an out - of - print book about Drumright history.
The military tribunal brought forth witnesses that discussed these incidents, and the man above — Rook — was a Tulsa police officer willing to testify against Merriweather.
Now, go search up all this on the internet. Ask Chat GPT about it. I’ll wait. Chat says that the Mer Rouge killings did not happen in Oklahoma. But—it does say that there's one article linking that style of murder to the Klan in Oklahoma. It’s this article—solid.
Ok, so AI has not completely erased the story of these murders in Oklahoma, but you really have to dig in deep. Walton, you see, was impeached and the Klan worked hard to undo all his anti-Klan activities and brand him as a corrupt buffoon. It was quite successful in that regard. Just ask the AI Mode of Google: Was Walton a good governor?
Months after the Klan-backed legislators impeached Walton, they chartered a special train to Dallas for the State Fair. It was a special "Ku Klux Klan Day at the Texas State Fair. The Oklahoman Klansmen arrived in their train with a banner.
“Did we impeach Walton?” the banner read. “Hell yes.”
Turns out the ghosts of the Klan are pretty good at infiltrating large language models.
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