Pakistan’s prominent news outlets Dawn as well as The Australia Today have published a fake, AI-generated image claiming to show the Pakistan national hockey team sitting on a footpath in Australia.

The image, which went viral on social media before being picked up by mainstream press, was used to illustrate the team’s genuine accommodation struggles during their recent tour. However, after fact-checking with Google Gemini’s AI-detector, the image is confirmed to be AI-generated.

The Dawn editorial staff failed to check the authenticity of the image and went ahead with publishing it on their daily newspaper.

This isn’t the first time Dawn has been caught sleeping at the wheel when it comes to AI. Just recently, the newspaper faced massive public backlash when it printed a business story titled “Auto sales rev up in October” that accidentally included a ChatGPT prompt.

The staff forgot to delete the AI’s internal response, which read: “If you want, I can also create an even snappier ‘front-page style’ version with punchy one-line stats… Do you want me to do that next?”

More recently, Dawn slipped up again, this time in a sports section featuring an article about Harif Rauf that included another ChatGPT prompt. However, the editorial staff was able to pick up the error and promptly remove it before printing.

The gaffe was printed and sold to the public, only being acknowledged after readers pointed it out on social media.

While the image is fake, Pakistan hockey team’s ordeal was unfortunately real. Due to the Pakistan Hockey Federation’s (PHF) failure to clear hotel payments, the had to live in cramped accommodations which sparked outrage nationwide and even prompt Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to order an inquiry of the incident.