Marc Chagall Never Painted That
Or Why AI Isn’t Google
It was a casual Friday. Nothing special—except I was on kid duty for lunch pickup, a rare detour in my usual routine.
As we strolled home, baguette under one arm, my daughter told me about her morning in class.
They had studied Marc Chagall. Her eyes sparkled as she recounted it, and then she asked if we could go see La Fée Électricité next time we were in Paris.
That name rang a bell, but I had no clue where that was exposed and if it was even in Paris. Painting is not my strong suit. Once home, I did what any responsible parent would do: I picked up my phone from my pocket and Googled it.
The first answer showed that the painting was exhibited in the Musée d’Art Modern de Paris. But I didn’t tell my daughter right away. As I was scrolling on my phone, something didn’t click.
The museum mentioned that this painting was from Raoul Dufy — not Chagal.
I triple-checked on the web and Wikipedia. The result was the same. La Fée Électricité isn’t by Chagall at all. It’s really by Raoul Dufy.
That’s when the realisation hit me. The mistake probably didn’t come from a textbook or even a hasty Wikipedia glance. No, my bet is the teacher asked ChatGPT (or Bard, or whatever the tool of the week is) to prepare her lesson. AI probably hallucinated the answer. And nobody caught it.
We’re at this weird moment where many people treat AI like it’s a search engine. Or worse: as if it’s a source of truth.
It’s not. It’s a conversation partner with infinite confidence and a shaky grasp on facts.
This isn’t a rant against AI. I use it daily and wouldn’t go back. But it’s a gentle reminder: if you don’t know how to question what it says—or double-check your sources—it’s easy to teach your whole class wrong facts.
No big deal this time. My kid went back to school in the afternoon after I dared her to ask her teacher if Chagal was really the painter behind La Fée Électricité. She did ask, and the teacher corrected her mistake for the whole class and moved on.
But next time, who knows?