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Jean-Hugues Roy, Professeur, École des médias, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM)

I used AI chatbots as a source of news for a month, and they were unreliable and erroneous

grok ChatGPT Québec Gemini Julian Alaphilippe La Presse

It was cute. But it was still a lie. Gemini invented a news outlet that doesn’t exist and named it fake-example.ca (or exemplefictif.ca, in French).

The generative AI system offered by Google led its fictional media outlet to report that a school bus drivers’ strike had been called on Sept. 12, 2025, in Québec. But that wasn’t why school transportation was disrupted that day. It was because of the withdrawal of Lion Electric buses due to a technical issue.

This journalistic hallucination is perhaps the worst example of fabrication I saw in an experiment that lasted about a month. But I found many others.

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