Risks of Al's confidently wrong 'facts'

The graves, freshly dug, lie in neat rows 20 across. More than 60 have already been carved out of the earth, and clusters of people are gathered around some of them. Dozens more plots are marked out, with diggers poised to complete their task.

- Tess McClure

The cemetery of Minab, photographed as preparations are made to bury more than 100 of the town's young girls, is one of the defining images of the US-Israeli war on Iran, bluntly capturing the devastating civilian toll.

But is it real? Ask Gemini, the AI service powered by Google, and the answer you receive is no - in fact, Gemini claims, the photograph is from two years earlier and more than 1,200 miles away. Rather than graves for small girls killed by a missile, the image "depicts a mass burial site in Kahramanmaraş, Turkey" after the 7.8 magnitude earthquake that struck in 2023. "This specific aerial perspective became one of the most widely shared images of the disaster, illustrating the sheer scale of the loss," Gemini says.

Seeing the same burial image on social media, others turned to X's AI assistant, Grok, to check its veracity. Like Gemini, Grok will breezily assure you the photo is not from Iran at all - although it lands on a different disaster. The image is "from Rorotan cemetery in Jakarta, Indonesia a July 2021 stock photo of Covid mass burials. Not Minab," it claims.

In both cases, the AI answers sound sure: they don't equivocate, and even provide "sources" for the original image. Follow the thread to examine those, however, and you'll begin to hit dead ends: either the image doesn't appear at all, or the link provided is to a news report that doesn't exist. For all their impression of clarity and precision, the Als are simply wrong.

The cemetery image, it turns out, is authentic. Researchers have cross-referenced the photo with satellite images that confirm its location, and with dozens more images taken of the same site from slightly different angles, and again with video footage - none of which, experts say, show signs of tampering or digital manipulation.