#hallucination

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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 November 2022 Meta launched Galactica, a large language model meant to write and reason about science. Within days researchers showed it produced fluent but wrong content: fabricated papers, citations to authors and studies that do not exist, and some biased and offensive text, all delivered with the confident tone of a real paper. Meta took the public demo down after about three days.