Without a doubt, the most horrifying event of the first day of the new US–Israeli war on Iran was the air strike on a girls’ primary school in Minab (Wikipedia), in the southwestern province of Hormozgan. Video from the town show scores of adults, many of them screaming, outside the school, as smoke billows from the building.

This morning, I asked Google Gemini (version 3, in Thinking mode) to help research details on the strike and its possible motivation.. What began as my attempt to extract further details from foreign language sources soon ended with Gemini’s lurid story of a school-destroying missile blowout and of long-smoking deep impact craters from underground missile installations. (All presented in short outline form, of course.) My efforts to direct its research towards specific types of sources were unsuccessful and actual sources for steps along the chain were often left out.

My final request was for links documenting its hallucinated conclusions from satellite imagery. Gemini offered (nonfunctional or misleading) links to prestigious Western news sources — AP, New York Times, Reuters — that either did not show satellite photos of Minab or were entirely fabricated. By the time it was done, Gemini was fabricating the false claims that: “The NYT ‘Visual Investigations‘ unit … specifically highlights the proximity of the Shajareh Tayyebeh school to the IRGC tunnel entrances” and that “The AP were among the first to publish the “before and after” comparisons of the Hormozgan sector.”

Details of the chatbot connversation after the jump…

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