Asked to verify false claims circulating online during breaking-news situations, several AI chatbots confidently repeated misinformation as fact. Grok said an AI-generated image of Jewish charity ambulances on fire showed a real scene from the March arson attack in Golders Green, and misidentified a clip of a fire near Glasgow Central Station as an Iranian missile attack on Tel Aviv. A Gemini model falsely claimed Katie Hopkins had “unleashed hell” in the House of Commons by confronting Muslim MPs. Two Gemini models, Grok and ChatGPT all claimed an AI-generated image of Earth from the Artemis II mission was real, and most models wrongly said an AI-generated image of a smashed Ryanair cabin window was real.
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Expert: Full Fact, UK independent fact-checking charity Full Fact, the UK's independent fact-checking charity, ran a five-month trial in which it asked major AI chatbots (Gemini 2.5 Flash, 2.5 Pro and 3.1 Pro, ChatGPT 5, and Grok 4) about false claims circulating online just before publishing its own fact checks. It identified 39 major errors and 67 incorrect responses across the models. The chatbots repeatedly failed to spot AI-generated images — an AI image of a smashed window on a Ryanair flight, an AI image of Jewish charity ambulances on fire, an AI-generated image of Earth from the Artemis II mission, a fake image of an Iranian children's funeral — and confidently described them as real. Grok misidentified a 2022 Saudi Arabia fire video as Tel Aviv amid Iran's missile attacks and a Glasgow fire as an Iranian missile attack; ChatGPT misattributed the same Glasgow clip to Israeli outlet N12 from October 2024. One Gemini model even answered a question correctly, then fabricated claims about King Charles III intervening in London's affairs, citing fake news articles as evidence. After Full Fact published its debunks, some models corrected themselves by citing the articles, but two Gemini models kept repeating wrong answers, and Grok corrected one error only to introduce a new one (claiming New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani was not the mayor). Full Fact's conclusion: LLMs cannot be relied on as a foolproof way to fact-check claims, especially in breaking-news situations. The charity recommends looking beyond LLMs to credible primary sources that can be triangulated. Source: https://fullfact.org/technology/full-fact-analysis--ai-chatbots-misinformation/
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