By Jean-Hugues Roy
Publication Date: 2026-01-11 13:10:00
It was sweet. But it was still a lie. Gemini invented a news agency that doesn’t exist and gave it a name fake-example.ca (or exemplefictif.cain French).
The generative AI system offered by Google caused its fictional media company to report that a school bus drivers’ strike had been declared in Quebec on September 12, 2025. But that wasn’t the reason why school transport was interrupted that day. The reason for this was the withdrawal of the Lion Electric buses due to a technical problem.
This journalistic hallucination is perhaps the worst example of fabrication I have seen in an experiment that lasted about a month. But I found many others.
For news, turn to AI chatbots
As a journalism professor with a focus on computer science, I have been using AI long before the launch of ChatGPT in 2022. According to the latest Digital News Report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, six percent of Canadians counted generative AI chatbots among their news sources in 2024.
I was curious…
