Kneel beside the old bridge at Sligachan on the Isle of Skye. Put your face in the river for seven seconds, stand up and let the water dry on your skin. The fairies will make you beautiful forever.
That’s the version Google’s AI Overview gives, and it’s the version a great many tourists have tried in that freezing water. It’s also wrong. The old story says the river gives wisdom.
Kenny Boyle, a Scottish actor and playwright who posts short videos about Scottish folklore, put up a clip this week calling the AI Overview out. His caption was blunt: “How that ai overview is destroying our culture.” Hundreds of commenters agreed, and plenty of them went further. AI is evil, one said. Another called it the single most devastating development of the century.
Then the tourists started talking, and the story got more interesting.
What is the real legend of the Sligachan river?
The story, as Skye tells it, starts with Scáthach, a legendary warrior woman who trained fighters at her fortress on the island, the place now called Dunscaith Castle. She was the greatest fighter in the land. Cú Chulainn, the champion of Irish legend, heard about her and crossed the sea to challenge her. He couldn’t stand the idea of a rival.
The duel went on for days. Scáthach had more skill. Cú Chulainn had more speed and strength. Neither would yield, and the noise of the fight rolled across the island.
Scáthach’s daughter, Uathach, was afraid her mother would die. She ran to the Sligachan river and wept into the water. The fairy queen heard her and told her to wash her face in the river. When she did, she knew how to save her mother.
She went home and cooked a feast. The smell drew both warriors in, they agreed to a truce long enough to eat, and once Cú Chulainn had eaten at Scáthach’s table, he was her guest.
You don’t fight your host. The battle ended in a draw.
That’s the gift of the river: the knowledge to stop a war without anybody dying. Somewhere along the line it turned into a beauty treatment.
Did AI invent the Sligachan beauty myth?
No, and the thread proved it.
One visitor said a tour guide told her group about the beauty version in 2003. Another went on a tour in 2006 and was promised eternal youth. Another stopped at the river on a tour in 2011 and heard about beauty. One woman took a bus tour in September 2024 and got the beauty version from a longtime Skye resident who teaches tourists for a living. A Scottish commenter said her own guide told her the same thing, before AI was in wide use.
Search for the river today and you’ll find a Scottish tourism site that tells the warrior story in full. Then it tells you the water now grants eternal beauty. Seven seconds, no wiping, and the fairies take care of the rest. Nobody has to cook a feast. The tour companies sell the version that gets people off the bus and onto their knees by the bridge. “Get wisdom” is a harder sell than “stay young forever.”
AI didn’t rewrite the Sligachan legend. It read what the tour buses had been saying for twenty years and repeated it with confidence. – Richard LoweShare on X
So the AI Overview didn’t make anything up. It did something more ordinary, and in some ways more troubling. It read what most of the web said and repeated it.
Boyle is right that the beauty version is wrong, and he’s doing exactly what a folklorist should. Blaming AI for a tourist myth that was decades old before AI turned up misses where the damage started.
Why does Google’s AI Overview get folklore wrong?
Because it summarizes the web, and the web is loud in favor of whatever gets clicked.
An AI Overview pulls from the pages that rank for a search and condenses what they say. When fifty travel blogs, tour company pages and Instagram captions say beauty, and a handful of folklore books and archive recordings say wisdom, the summary goes with the crowd. The more pages repeat a version, the more right it looks. It has no way to know that the old version came first. It only knows which version shows up most.
One commenter summed it up: AI gives you the popular answer. The popular answer and the true one aren’t always the same. Another compared it to putting the truth up for a vote.
And it gets worse over time. Pages written by AI repeat the beauty version, and the next summary reads those pages too. One commenter said she can no longer trust recent reference books on folklore, because some of them are generated. Another compared it to the old party game where a sentence gets whispered around a circle and comes back unrecognizable. The difference is that this circle has millions of people in it, and the last person in line sounds like an encyclopedia.
Anyone who uses these tools should know that. The AI doesn’t know folklore. It knows what people have written about it. If you want to see how badly that can go when you publish under your own name, I wrote about it in AI Hallucination: A Survival Guide.
I use AI every day as a digital assistant that helps me write. I wouldn’t trust its summary of a Skye legend any further than I’d trust a tour bus driver’s.
Has folklore always been rewritten like this?
For as long as anybody’s been retelling it.
A commenter in the thread pointed to the classic example. Vikings didn’t wear horned helmets.
No horned helmet has ever been found from the Viking Age. The horns came from the 1870s, when costume designer Carl Emil Doepler put them on the singers for the first full staging of Wagner’s Ring cycle at Bayreuth in 1876. The image stuck so hard that most people today can’t picture a Viking without them.
The Norse gods themselves went through the same thing. Almost everything we know about them was written down by a Christian Icelander about two centuries after his country converted. I traced how far one of those gods has traveled since in the evolution of Loki, from the Eddas to Marvel to a Jim Carrey comedy.
Other commenters had their own examples. Celtic gods turned into saints. A local witch hunt history got its ages and numbers wrong online. A Greek myth a woman grew up with turned out, according to the AI, to match a movie.
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance said it in 1962: when the legend becomes fact, print the legend. Terry Pratchett said it in The Truth, that a lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on. Neither of them needed a chatbot to make the point.
How do you keep folklore accurate when AI repeats the wrong version?
Publish the right version where people can find it.
That’s the uncomfortable lesson in the Sligachan story. The AI repeated the beauty myth because the beauty myth was everywhere and the wisdom story was mostly in books, archives and the memories of people who grew up with it. Oral tradition is fragile that way. If the true version lives only in people’s heads, the internet fills the gap with whatever the tourist trade wrote down. The wisdom story never got a brochure or a travel blog with a stock photo of the bridge.
Boyle’s videos are part of the fix. Every clip he posts and every page that tells the story properly gives the next summary something better to work from. Commenters in the thread asked him for a book they could buy, a written record they could keep. One suggested a small sign at the bridge with a QR code to the real legend. Another pointed to the archive of recordings at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Scottish Studies. Its archive preserves a huge store of stories recorded in the twentieth century.
Those are good ideas. Write the stories down and record them. Put them on a page with a clear title so a search engine can find it. The people who know the old stories are the only ones who can push back against the new ones.
Writers have a stake in this too. If you write fantasy or historical fiction, you pull from the same well of myths and legends, and the top search result is the easiest bucket to grab. A novelist who borrows the Sligachan story from an AI summary ends up putting the tourist version in print, where it looks even more official. Go back to the collections, the archives and the people who tell the stories. My guide to writing fairy tales covers how to work with old material without flattening it.
Is blaming AI for cultural loss fair?
Partly, and only partly.
AI makes the problem faster. A summary at the top of every search reaches more people than any tour guide, and it sounds more authoritative.
That’s a real problem, and Boyle is right to say so loudly.
But the thread was full of people saying AI is evil and anybody who uses it needs a reality check, in a conversation where half the evidence showed the myth was older than the tool. The tour buses did this. Travel writers did this. People who wanted a nicer story for the brochure did this. The AI just read their work back.
So who should Boyle be angry at? The AI Overview, sure, for repeating a tourist myth to millions of people with a straight face. The tour operators, for trading a story about a daughter saving her mother for a skincare pitch. And the rest of us, for clicking on the version with the nicer promise.
It’s a tool. Use it or don’t. If the stories matter to you, do what storytellers have always done. Tell them right and write them down.
The wisdom in the water
There’s a joke buried in the whole mess, and several commenters found it. Anybody who sticks their face in a freezing Highland river for seven seconds, expecting to come up beautiful, and finds they haven’t changed, has learned something. One man said he dipped his face, gained wisdom, and the wisdom was that putting your face in a freezing river is a bad idea.
That’s the river still doing its job.
If you want to go see it for yourself, Boyle’s new play, Badhbh Shìth and the Storytellers, runs at Òran Mòr in Glasgow at the end of October, part of the lunchtime theatre series A Play, A Pie and A Pint. And if you’re writing folklore into your own fiction, the AI and writing hub covers how to use these tools without letting them rewrite your sources. Check the old books first. Then kneel by the river and ask for wisdom.
