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ChatGPT Fabricated a Photorealistic 'Historical Photograph' With an Invented Studio Credit After a User Explicitly Asked for Real Images
An r/OpenAI user asked in thinking mode whether any image exists of Armenian and Greek rebels fighting together in the Greco-Turkish War or WWI; after 80 seconds of reasoning ChatGPT generated a photorealistic image and presented it as historical, complete with a fabricated in-image caption reading 'GREEK AND ARMENIAN FIGHTERS IN CILICIA — From a Photograph by Garo Studio, Mersina.' The user reverse-image-searched it (nothing), ran an AI detector (99%), and got the model to admit 'I made a serious mistake.' The failure mode worth noting is compound: not just a hallucinated artifact but a hallucinated provenance chain baked into the pixels, which survives copy-paste in a way a text hallucination does not.
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