South Africa, Jan. 13 -- The generative AI system offered by Google led its fictional media outlet to report that a school bus drivers' strike had been called on 12 Sept 2025, in Quebec. 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.

Turning to AI chatbots for news

As a journalism professor specialising in computer science, I have been using AI long before the advent of ChatGPT in 2022. According to the latest Digital News Report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, https:/...