I recently had the same experience. Go looking for software; find an article that describes a project in detail that does exactly what you asked for; project doesn't exist; further investigation finds no reference to the software anywhere other than that article.

This has happened a couple of times to me; the tip-off is that there's no link to the project in the article, although sometimes there'll be a link to a domain owned by a squatter or something unrelated. Unless the article has a date and it's from a decade ago, I chalk those up to AI as well. I'm certain there are thousands of abandoned projects and domains, deleted repos, and so forth, but I think increasingly the odds of AI shenanigans are pretty high in these cases.