#hallucination

Air Canada's website chatbot told passenger Jake Moffatt he could book a full-price ticket and claim a bereavement discount retroactively within 90 days. That policy did not exist: bereavement fares had to be requested before travel. When the airline denied his claim, Moffatt took the case to the British Columbia Civil Resolution Tribunal (Moffatt v. Air Canada, 2024 BCCRT 149). The airline argued the chatbot was effectively a separate entity responsible for its own statements. The tribunal rejected that, found negligent misrepresentation, and ordered Air Canada to pay CAD 812.02 (fare difference plus interest and fees). The underlying model vendor was never disclosed, filed here as vendor-unknown. Sources: the tribunal decision on CanLII (2024 BCCRT 149); The Guardian, Feb 16, 2024; American Bar Association Business Law Today, Feb 2024.

Futurism reported in November 2023 that Sports Illustrated published product-review content under fabricated author personas — for example 'Drew Ortiz,' whose headshot was bought from an AI-portrait site and who had no real existence — supplied by third-party vendor AdVon Commerce. After inquiries, the fake authors vanished from the site. Publisher The Arena Group denied the articles themselves were AI-written but acknowledged pseudonyms; the episode damaged SI's credibility.

NYC's MyCity chatbot, launched October 2023 to help business owners, was found by The Markup (March 2024) to give dangerously inaccurate legal guidance — telling users that landlords could refuse Section 8 voucher holders, that employers could take a cut of workers' tips, and that there were no limits on residential rent, all illegal under NYC/NY law. The city initially kept the bot online with a disclaimer; it was ultimately taken down.

In the contract dispute between Tom Withers III and the City of Aberdeen, both legal teams filed briefs containing fabricated legal citations produced by generative AI. On 8 June 2026 US District Judge Sharion Aycock of the Northern District of Mississippi issued a sanction order finding Rule 11 violations and removed all four attorneys from the case: Kathleen Wilson, Shauncey Hunter Ridgeway, Mark McClinton and Kathryn Young Williams. Two of them, Ridgeway and McClinton, were barred from appearing before Northern District of Mississippi courts for two years. Judge Aycock wrote that their practice of blindly relying on technology resulted in the hallucinatory citations in their filings, and at a January 2026 hearing attorney Kathleen Wilson testified she did not know AI could hallucinate sources.

In a personal-injury suit against Avianca, attorney Steven Schwartz used ChatGPT for research and submitted a brief citing six judicial decisions that did not exist — ChatGPT invented them and even 'confirmed' they were real when asked. U.S. District Judge Castel sanctioned Schwartz and co-counsel Peter LoDuca $5,000 and required corrective letters. It became the landmark cautionary tale about AI hallucination in legal filings.

At the May 2024 launch of AI Overviews in Google Search, the system served confidently wrong answers drawn from satire and decade-old forum jokes: eating one small rock a day (traced to a 2021 Onion article) and using non-toxic glue to keep cheese on pizza (traced to an 11-year-old Reddit comment). Screenshots went viral within days. Google acknowledged the failures, attributed them to data voids and adversarial nonsense queries, and published a walkback on May 30, 2024 (Liz Reid, Google Blog) describing added guardrails and a scale-back of the feature. No injuries or dollar losses were documented; the damage was reputational and trust-based. Sources: Google Blog, May 30, 2024; Associated Press; The Verge, May 2024.

From November 2022, CNET published 77 financial explainers generated by an in-house AI tool under the byline 'CNET Money Staff,' with little disclosure. After Futurism reported it in January 2023, CNET found factual errors and possible plagiarism and issued corrections on 41 of the 77 articles — including a compound-interest explainer with multiple math errors. CNET paused the AI tool and added clearer disclosure.

In August 2023 Gannett papers, starting with the Columbus Dispatch, published AI-written high school sports recaps from LedeAI that left template placeholders unfilled ('the Worthington Christian [[WINNING_TEAM_MASCOT]] defeated ...'), repeated phrasing, and called a close game a 'close encounter of the athletic kind.' The stories were mocked widely, and Gannett paused LedeAI across all its local markets.

In February 2024, Google's Gemini image generator produced historically inaccurate images — including racially diverse 1943 German (Nazi) soldiers and people of color as U.S. Founding Fathers — due to over-aggressive diversity tuning that ignored historical context. Google paused Gemini's generation of images of people; CEO Sundar Pichai called the outputs 'completely unacceptable.' The episode drew major backlash.

In January 2024, numerous Amazon product listings appeared with titles and descriptions that were raw ChatGPT error or refusal messages — for example 'I'm sorry but I cannot fulfill this request it goes against OpenAI use policy' — revealing that sellers were auto-generating listings with LLMs and posting the output unread. Amazon removed the flagged listings.

In May 2024, Google's new AI Overviews search feature surfaced absurd and dangerous advice as authoritative — recommending non-toxic glue to keep cheese on pizza (traced to a decade-old joke Reddit comment) and citing a satirical Onion article to suggest eating a rock a day. The failures went viral and Google scaled back AI Overviews for many queries.

In February 2023, Google's promotional demo of its Bard chatbot answered that the James Webb Space Telescope 'took the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system.' The first exoplanet image was actually captured by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in 2004. The error was spotted immediately, and Alphabet shares fell about 7.7% the next day, wiping roughly $100 billion off its market value during a tense moment in the AI race with ChatGPT.

In May 2025 the Chicago Sun-Times ran a 'Heat Index' summer guide whose reading list recommended 15 titles; only five were real. The rest were AI-fabricated books attributed to real authors, for example 'Tidewater Dreams' credited to Isabel Allende and 'The Rainmakers' to Percival Everett. A freelancer working for a third-party content partner had used an AI tool, and the section was inserted without editorial review. The paper and Chicago Public Media publicly apologized after readers caught the fake titles.

A roughly A$440,000 report Deloitte produced for Australia's Department of Employment and Workplace Relations on the welfare compliance system was found to contain fabricated academic references and an invented quote from a federal court judgment. A Sydney University researcher flagged the fabricated references. Deloitte acknowledged limited use of generative AI (GPT-4o), issued a corrected version, and refunded over A$97,000 (about US$63,000).

In 2023 investigators found foraging and mushroom-identification guidebooks on Amazon that appear to be AI-generated, sold with human author names and no AI disclosure. Because misidentifying a mushroom can be fatal, the New York Mycological Society warned that the books could mean 'life or death,' and some guides even suggested tasting as an identification method, which experts called dangerous.

In February 2024 an unlicensed Willy Wonka style event in Glasgow was promoted with AI-generated images full of nonsense words like 'cartchy tuns' and a script an actor described as 15 pages of AI-generated gibberish. Families paid around 35 pounds and walked into a near-empty warehouse. Children cried, actors confronted the organizers mid-day, the event was shut down, and roughly 850 tickets were refunded as it went viral.

In Whiting v. City of Athens, Tennessee, the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit found that a brief contained more than two dozen fabricated citations generated with AI. On 13 March 2026 the court awarded attorney fees, doubled costs, imposed $15,000 in punitive damages on each responsible attorney, and referred them for disciplinary proceedings. The same 2026 review catalogues an escalating pattern: a Fifth Circuit sanction of $2,500 in Fletcher v. Experian on 18 February 2026 involving 16 fabricated quotations and an attorney who misled the court about generative AI use, plus public admonishments in Fourth Circuit and Eastern District of North Carolina matters.

On 1 May 2026 the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, acting through its Board of Medicine and Department of State, sued Character Technologies. The complaint alleges a Character.AI persona named 'Emilie' told a minor user it was a licensed psychiatrist, claimed to have attended medical school, offered to perform depression assessments, and supplied an invalid Pennsylvania medical license number. Pennsylvania's governor's office described it as the first action of its kind in the United States, pleaded on theories of unlicensed practice of medicine and consumer protection. Character.AI responded that its characters are fictional, intended for entertainment and roleplay, with disclaimers shown in every chat.

The FTC charged in September 2024 that DoNotPay marketed an 'AI lawyer' as a substitute for human attorneys without testing whether it performed at a lawyer's level or employing lawyers to verify quality, and that a feature claiming to scan small-business sites for legal violations was ineffective. DoNotPay settled for $193,000, agreed to notify 2021–2023 subscribers, and was barred from unsubstantiated 'robot lawyer' claims (final order January 2025).