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PARIS: This image by AFP photojournalist Omar Al-Qattaa shows a skeletal, underfed girl in Gaza, where Israel’s blockade has fueled fears of mass famine in the Palestinian territory.

But when social media users asked Grok where it came from, X boss Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot was certain that the photograph was taken in Yemen nearly seven years ago.

The AI bot’s untrue response was widely shared online and a left-wing pro-Palestinian French lawmaker, Aymeric Caron, was accused of peddling disinformation on the Israel-Hamas war for posting the photo.

At a time when Internet users are turning to AI to verify images more and more, the furor shows the risks of trusting tools like Grok, when the technology is far from error-free.

Grok said the photo showed Amal Hussain, a seven-year-old Yemeni child, in October 2018.

In fact the photo shows nine-year-old Mariam Dawwas in the arms of her mother Modallala in Gaza City on August 2, 2025.

Before the war, sparked by Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, Mariam weighed 25 kilograms, her mother told AFP.

Today, she weighs only nine. The only nutrition she gets to help her condition is milk, Modallala told AFP — and even that’s “not always available.”

Challenged on its incorrect response, Grok said: “I do not spread fake news; I base my answers on verified sources.”

The chatbot eventually issued a response that recognized the error — but in reply to further queries the next day, Grok repeated its claim that the photo was from Yemen.

The chatbot has previously issued content that praised Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and that suggested people with Jewish surnames were more likely to spread online hate.



Grok’s mistakes illustrate the limits of AI tools, whose functions are as impenetrable as “black boxes,” said Louis de Diesbach, a researcher in technological ethics.

“We don’t know exactly why they give this or that reply, nor how they prioritize their sources,” said Diesbach, author of a book on AI tools, “Hello ChatGPT.”

Each AI has biases linked to the information it was trained on and the instructions of its creators, he said.

In the researcher’s view Grok, made by Musk’s xAI start-up, shows “highly pronounced biases which are highly aligned with the ideology” of the South African billionaire, a former confidante of US President Donald Trump and a standard-bearer for the radical right.

Asking a chatbot to pinpoint a photo’s origin takes it out of its proper role, said Diesbach.

“Typically, when you look for the origin of an image, it might say: ‘This photo could have been taken in Yemen, could have been taken in Gaza, could have been taken in pretty much any country where there is famine’.”

AI does not necessarily seek accuracy — “that’s not the goal,” the expert said.

Another AFP photograph of a starving Gazan child by Al-Qattaa, taken in July 2025, had already been wrongly located and dated by Grok to Yemen, 2016.

That error led to Internet users accusing the French newspaper Liberation, which had published the photo, of manipulation.



An AI’s bias is linked to the data it is fed and what happens during fine-tuning — the so-called alignment phase — which then determines what the model would rate as a good or bad answer.

“Just because you explain to it that the answer’s wrong doesn’t mean it will then give a different one,” Diesbach said.

“Its training data has not changed and neither has its alignment.”

Grok is not alone in wrongly identifying images.

When AFP asked Mistral AI’s Le Chat — which is in part trained on AFP’s articles under an agreement between the French start-up and the news agency — the bot also misidentified the photo of Mariam Dawwas as being from Yemen.

For Diesbach, chatbots must never be used as tools to verify facts.

“They are not made to tell the truth,” but to “generate content, whether true or false,” he said.

“You have to look at it like a friendly pathological liar — it may not always lie, but it always could.”

LONDON: Survivors and relatives of Israeli victims of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack have filed a lawsuit against Meta, accusing the American tech giant of enabling and amplifying the atrocities through its platforms.

The plaintiffs are seeking nearly 4 billion shekels ($1.17 billion) in damages. The figure comprises 200,000 shekels for each victim whose suffering was broadcast or documented on Meta platforms and 20,000 shekels for every Israeli who was exposed to the footage.

The suit, filed with the Tel Aviv District Court, could set a precedent for social media companies. It alleges that Facebook and Instagram became “a pipeline for terror,” allowing Hamas militants to livestream and upload videos of killings, kidnappings and other atrocities.

The plaintiffs claim Meta failed to block or remove the footage in real time and left some content online for hours or even days.

Israeli news website Ynet reported that the legal action was initiated by the Idan family, who said Hamas gunmen stormed their home, held them hostage and murdered their eldest daughter, Maayan — all while livestreaming the attack on the mother’s Facebook account. The father, Tsachi, was abducted to Gaza and later killed.

“They livestreamed the murder of our daughter, our other children’s trauma and our cries for help,” the mother was quoted as saying.

“Facebook and Instagram enabled the broadcast of a brutal terror attack. And Meta is still allowing the footage to circulate.”

Another plaintiff said she learned of her grandmother Bracha Levinson’s abduction and death only after Hamas uploaded the footage to her Facebook page.

The lawsuit also includes claims from members of the public who say they were exposed to graphic and traumatic content simply by logging on to the platforms that day. They accuse Meta of failing to act quickly to protect users from the livestreamed violence. The platforms, they argue, became “an inseparable part of Hamas’ terror infrastructure.”

Meta is also accused of violating victims’ privacy and dignity, and of profiting from the viral spread of the footage. Plaintiffs argue that the company failed to activate rapid response systems or prevent its algorithms from promoting the violent content.

“Our hearts go out to the families affected by Hamas terrorism,” a Meta spokesperson said, adding that the company had set up dedicated teams working round the clock to remove the content and continued to remove any material that supported or glorified Hamas or the Oct. 7 attack.

The case is one of several filed in Israel and the US targeting actors accused of aiding or enabling Hamas propaganda and logistics. Last month, families of more than 120 victims sued the Palestinian Authority, claiming its “pay-for-slay” policy — providing monthly stipends to convicted attackers or their families — constituted material support for the massacre.