A local politician’s claim shows how AI searches can lead users astray – Cardinal News
Did you know that all of our daily news stories can come directly to you? Sign up for our free, daily newsletter and you’ll get all the latest local news, weather, sports, as well as obituaries, public notices, and more!
Did you miss this story?
Census: Roanoke’s population decline is accelerating, city on pace to rival its steep drop in the 1960s
You won’t miss out when you sign up for our free daily newsletter.
Cardinal News
Serving Southwest and Southside Virginia
Searching for facts on the internet isn’t what it used to be. One example arose during a Radford City Council meeting last month.
As the council discussed adopting a resolution declaring that Radford is a Second Amendment sanctuary city, council member Guy Wohlford spoke up.
“I also did a little research with AI and Google,” Wohlford said. “It told me that 95% of the political jurisdictions in Virginia have passed these resolutions. So, it seems like a popular thing to do.”
None of his colleagues disputed the claim, but that seemed like a big percentage, one in need of fact-checking. Cardinal News, after digging into multiple sources including the U.S. Census and the Virginia Association of Counties, calculated that 46% of the commonwealth’s political jurisdictions — cities, towns and counties — have adopted such a resolution.
“Looks like I need to make a correction regarding my figures at our next council meeting,” said Wohlford, who said he’d used Google’s Gemini for AI results. “I appreciate you looking into this.”
His experience isn’t uncommon. There is a lot of misinformation available through artificial intelligence and Google these days, and most people aren’t aware of how to best use the services, said Chirag Shah, a professor at the University of Washington’s Information School.
“I think education and awareness is very important, as these tools become more and more available, and more and more people use it,” said Shah, who specializes in AI, search and recommender systems and machine learning. “What troubles me the most is, it’s sort of like, speaking of the Second Amendment, you know, you barely learn to use a gun, and now you get a bazooka, right?”
By the early 20th century, Google’s growth into a search engine giant was such that people didn’t say they would use a search engine to find something. They simply “googled” it. It wasn’t always perfect, but you didn’t get search results that told you Elmer’s glue was the best way to keep cheese from sliding off your pizza.
That’s an example that Shah brought up when discussing the problems with AI search reliability.
“When we think about AI search, we have to understand that it’s not just a search in the traditional sense,” he said. “When we talked about search, we talked about putting in some keywords in the system, matching it with what’s available out there and returning a set of things that we can go through and maybe find what we’re looking for.”
Today, a Google search doesn’t always give you artificial intelligence results. Put a name in — say, “Atlanta” — and you get the old-school experience, a list of websites to check, with an option to click for AI mode. Put in a question, though, as Wohlford did, and AI shows up at the top of the page, with the conventional search results below it.
With AI, there is the aspect that does the search, like the traditional model, then another part that generates the answer using top results. The second aspect is called retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG.
“This is the typical system that Gemini and pretty much everybody uses these days,” Shah said. “All of this is hidden from the user, so you only see the final outcome of it. Within this black box, there are multiple things that are kind of disconnected from the user. The user doesn’t have control over it, which means there could be things that any of one of these components can do wrong.”
It has no sense of nuance, so when people queried Google’s AI in 2024 about the best way to keep the cheese on the pizza, a popular Reddit comment — years old and fully sarcastic — appeared on the page.
AI does learn through training, though, and these days if you ask the same question, you’ll get a better result. Scroll down for this note: “Contrary to some incorrect AI-generated suggestions, do not use glue in your pizza sauce.” Then a little further down the page, Gemini repeats its standard line about double-checking its responses.
After all, it is now interpreting your question, which you posted in natural language, then turning it into something that it can search for, Shah said.
“So that’s the first place where things could go wrong,” he said. “But you wouldn’t know because the system is not telling you what its understanding of your question is.”
In an email exchange last week about his statement to Radford’s council, Wohlford said he used the query: “What percentage of political bodies in Virginia have passed second amendment sanctuary city resolutions?”
Cardinal posed the same question to Google, in AI mode. It responded:
“As of March 2026, approximately 95% of political jurisdictions in Virginia have passed Second Amendment sanctuary resolutions.”
Gemini cited two sources, the Second Amendment Foundation and website of The Patriot/The Southwest Times, a Pulaski-based news organization. The only time The Patriot mentioned the figure was in quoting Wohlford. The Second Amendment Foundation’s article cites a Virginia-based gun-rights advocate who told its reporter that more than 95% of Virginia’s counties have made such declarations.
The same question, posed directly to Google, revealed its AI overview feature. It read: “Based on reports following the 2019 elections and into early 2020, over 90% of counties in Virginia, along with dozens of cities and towns, passed Second Amendment sanctuary resolutions. The Virginia Citizens Defense League (VCDL) indicated that by early 2020, more than 120 localities had adopted these measures, with some reports suggesting the number was closer to 200 municipalities.”
The “closer to 200 municipalities” figure comes from the BBC, according to the overview.
Click the overview and scroll a little farther down, though, to see this digital caution: “AI can make mistakes, so double-check responses.” AI mode does not provide that warning, though it does ask if the 95% figure was “specific enough.”
To get the number specific enough, it was important to learn which localities have resolutions similar to the one that Radford passed on Feb. 23. The Virginia Citizens Defense League offers on its website a boilerplate Second Amendment sanctuary proclamation that localities can download, and it keeps a list of all the localities that have approved one. A simple Google query about how many Virginia localities have Second Amendment sanctuary resolutions will take you there.
That number is 149 and now includes Radford, though some members of the council said that the resolution has no legal force, even as they approved it, 3-2. Vice Mayor Seth Gillespie said that it is like other resolutions that the body approves, “symbolic in nature.” He seconded Wohlford’s motion, anyway.
The VCDL list includes Henrico and Surry counties, but with asterisks, after the VCDL said they “reneged on their sanctuary status by enacting a carry ban in their local government buildings.” Nearly all of the resolutions were passed about 2019, in response to a new Democratic majority in the General Assembly that pledged to create tougher gun laws.
So, that’s 149 — or 147, depending on how you feel about Henrico County and Surry County. Encyclopediavirginia.org tells us there are 38 cities in the commonwealth. Vaco.org gives us a figure of 95 counties, and the U.S. census tells us there are 190 incorporated towns. That’s a total of 323 localities.
From there, it’s the old baseball batting average trick. Divide the number of resolutions, or hits, by the total number of jurisdictions, or times at bat. 149/323=0.46, or 46%.
Shah laughed when told of this method.
“I’m laughing because you’re describing, of course, what I would suggest, but … like most people are not going to do that,” he said. “And therein lies the fundamental problem. We can blame the systems. The systems are imperfect for sure, but there’s also human nature, right?
“We’re looking for quick and easy answers. … I feel like the core problem is that we’re not doing that due diligence … and so I think the responsibility is on us. If you’re using these tools, I wouldn’t prohibit using them. They can be useful, but we have to have that responsibility, that caution and that due diligence.”
Donate today to help Cardinal News stay paywall-free.
Tad Dickens is technology reporter for Cardinal News. He previously worked for the Bristol Herald Courier… More by Tad Dickens 
View new obituaries in real time from all across our region.
Do you have a story you think we should tell? A question you want answered?
Send us a tip.
We read everything you send.
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
a proud member of the
following organizations:
Sign in by entering the code we sent to , or clicking the magic link in the email.
Read our privacy policy and terms of service about what information we collect. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
source
This is a newsfeed from leading technology publications. No additional editorial review has been performed before posting.
