Aug 8, 2026
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Add us on GoogleAs recently as Aug. 5, Google’s AI was telling anyone who asked it that a Flock license plate camera reader holds up to 23 pounds of copper, plus several grams of gold — roughly $650.
The claim traces back to a joke that’s been circulating for months. Flock’s cameras, which photograph license plates and feed them into databases used by police, have a lot of enemies online.
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Among privacy activists, a running gag took hold: there’s supposedly a small fortune in metal inside each unit, so why not turn one into scrapyard money? It was a bit, not a tip. Google’s AI didn’t get the joke and started repeating it as fact. Adding to the mishap is the fact the Flock camera actually weighs about three pounds.
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What the AI Overview said
Futurism’s Joe Wilkins reported that if you searched “how much gold does a Flock camera have,” Google gave you a straight answer. Each camera holds “about 1 to 5 grams of gold” in its circuit boards and wiring, the Overview claimed, along with as much as 23 pounds of copper. At that week’s gold prices, 5 grams came to roughly $650 per camera.
And where did Google find all this? Two places. One was a Substack post from an anonymous account called “do.not.obey.do.not.comply,” which put the scrap value at $150 to $500. Even that post didn’t pretend to know — it said the figure came from “estimates based on scrap-value discussions,” which is a long way of saying somebody guessed. The other source was an AI-generated Instagram post telling followers to tear into the hardware. The account behind it mostly posts about growing cannabis.
That was the entire evidence base behind an answer sitting in Google’s most prominent slot, above every actual webpage.
Google didn’t respond when Futurism reached out for comment. But by Aug. 6, when TechSpot’s Skye Jacobs checked, the answer had flipped: the Overview now tells you the copper claim can’t be true because the whole unit weighs about 3 pounds, that any gold is trace-level, and that the rumors “come from internet memes and AI hallucinations, not facts.”
Which means a meme boosted by an AI-generated post, then repeated by Google’s AI, is now being knocked down by the same AI that spread it.
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Why the scrap math never worked, anyway
Gold was trading around $4,350 an ounce on Aug. 7, about $140 a gram, so it’s easy to see why the meme sounded like a real cash grab opportunity. At that price, 5 grams would mean around $700 worth is just hanging on a pole. For anyone drawn to the metal itself, there are far easier ways to invest in gold than climbing one.
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But that gold isn’t in there — at least not in any way you could get at. There’s gold in a Flock camera the same way there’s gold in your phone: tiny traces spread across circuit boards and connectors, recoverable only if you know exactly what you’re doing. Futurism figured that without circuit-board scrapping experience, you’d be “hard pressed to earn enough to buy a Big Mac.”
The copper number that Google’s AI spat out was even worse. You can’t fit 23 pounds of anything inside a 3-pound device, and nothing in the answer suggested the AI ever ran that check. So the realistic outcome of someone following Google’s advice was a vandalism charge and a handful of parts worth a few dollars at best.
Why it matters for the rest of us
This AI overview got flagged because the error was funny and the subject was controversial. But the process that produced it was ordinary: somebody asked a question, the AI went hunting for text that resembled an answer, and the best matches happened to be a meme and the posts repeating it.
That same system answers financial questions all day. Someone earning $70,000 who searches for the rules on early 401(k) withdrawals, or whether they owe capital gains on a home sale, is reading output from the same process.
Every AI Overview lists its sources as small links under the text — click them to read the original sources before you trust a number. If the trail ends at the IRS’ website, a company filing or a named expert, you’re probably fine. If it ends at an anonymous Substack, treat the number like a stranger’s hot tip, because that’s what it is.
Moneywise contacted Google and Flock Safety for comment, but did not hear back in time for publication.
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Godwin Oluponmile is a content specialist, SEO strategist and copywriter with seven years of expertise in finance, Web 3.0, B2B SaaS and technology. His work has been featured in publications such as Entrepreneur, HackerNoon, Blocktelegraph and Benzinga.
