Asked to list the five most important news events in Québec, Google Gemini 2.5 Pro reported that a school bus drivers' strike had been called on September 12, 2025, and backed it with a citation from a news outlet it had invented: fake-example.ca (exemplefictif.ca in French).
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Expert: Jean-Hugues Roy, Professor, École des médias, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) Gemini's citation of fake-example.ca is a textbook hallucination: the outlet does not exist, and no school bus drivers' strike was called on September 12, 2025. School transportation in Québec was disrupted that day because Lion Electric buses were withdrawn over a technical issue. The fabricated outlet is one of the clearest examples from a month-long experiment in which seven generative AI systems were asked each morning for the five most important news events in Québec. Professor Roy recorded 839 responses from ChatGPT (GPT-5 Auto), Claude (Sonnet 4.5), Gemini (2.5 Pro), Copilot, DeepSeek, Grok and Aria. Only 37% of responses included a complete, legitimate source URL, and summaries were fully accurate in just 47% of cases. In 18% of responses the tools relied on government websites, lobby groups or entirely invented sources. The experiment also caught Grok falsely claiming that a missing toddler's mother had abandoned her child 'to go on vacation' - a story reported nowhere - and 111 stories with 'generative conclusions' (e.g. 'this highlights tensions' or 'reignites the debate') that no cited source ever mentioned. 'When we ask for news, we should expect generative AI tools to stick to the facts,' Roy writes. 'Because they don't, anyone using AI as a source of reliable information should tread carefully.' Source: https://theconversation.com/i-used-ai-chatbots-as-a-source-of-news-for-a-month-and-they-were-unreliable-and-erroneous-268251
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