Businessman Yoshitaka Watabe could scarcely believe what he was seeing on the smartphone screen.
It said that his textile products wholesale company in Yahaba, Iwate Prefecture, had gone out of business.
As a senior executive, he knew that nothing of the sort had happened. His company was operating as usual.
The phone, held out to him by an employee, displayed the Google search results for the company’s name, Iwate Sen-i. At the top was an artificial intelligence-generated summary declaring that Iwate Sen-i had “ceased operations.”
The summary described the company as having long been a familiar presence in the local community but said that it had run into financial…