WILLOUGHBY, Ohio — A local bookstore owner is fighting for answers about inaccuracies in his business profile created by artificial intelligence (AI) that he believes are hurting sales.
“The fact that we know about it, that we’re fighting for it, and that the community is rallying behind us, is why we’re able to stay in business,” said Chanel Bush, who opened Viridian Bookshop in downtown Willoughby late last year.
About a week ago, she said, a customer told her that Google AI’s store overview incorrectly claimed the bookstore was permanently closed and at the wrong address several doors down. This customer trusts the AI brief and said it kept him from visiting the store a few weeks ago.
Before he knew his mistake, Mr. Bush noticed a drop in sales and wondered if he was doing something wrong as a new small business owner. She now attributes a significant portion of her losses to inaccurate Google AI summaries.
“I was shocked. I was confused,” Bush said. “But in a way, it was a little bit justified because our business was in serious decline.”
Google’s AI Overview often appears at the top of web pages and is intended as an overview of important information about a topic. Results vary from person to person.
Bush said he tried everything he could think of to fix the error, including repeatedly reporting the inaccuracy, filling out Google’s complaint form, crowdsourcing ideas from his social media followers, and even chatting with an AI bot to get to the root cause of the problem.
As of Thursday morning, searches from her phone were still incorrect.
“It’s not easy to ask for help,” she says.
Michael Goldberg, a professor at Case Western Reserve University’s Weatherhead School of Business, says that “it’s a bit of a wild west right now” when it comes to regulating AI.
He said companies such as Google, ChatGPT and Claude do not have proper helplines to call in cases like this, making it even more difficult for small and medium-sized businesses to navigate the rapidly changing technology landscape.
“We don’t have the regulatory support that would actually force big tech companies to be more cooperative and responsive in these cases,” he said. “So I think it’s still a work in progress.”
While waiting for a resolution, Mr. Busch has been posting on social media to let people know he is still open for business. She said her community turned a difficult situation into something positive.
“Since we posted about this, it has generated the most online traffic we have ever had, other than when we first opened,” she said.
However, he said he has heard from other business owners who are facing similar problems.
“The more voices we have to talk about this issue, the more likely we are to solve it,” she said. “Not just for us, but for other companies as well.”
Google did not respond to Spectrum News 1’s request for comment until this article was published.
