How AI chatbots falsely described photos Gavin Newsom shared of sleeping troops

As President Donald Trump deployed the National Guard and hundreds of U.S. Marines to Los Angeles in response to protests, California Gov. Gavin Newsom posted photos he said showed how the service members were being treated.

The two photos showed service members sleeping on the floor in a crowded space. Newsom posted the pictures June 9 on X, addressing Trump: "You sent your troops here without fuel, food, water or a place to sleep. Here they are — being forced to sleep on the floor, piled on top of one another."

Protests in downtown Los Angeles began June 6 in response to reports of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids. Newsom and Trump have battled over the federal government deploying troops to LA.

X users claimed the photos don’t show what Newsom said.

One X user said Newsom is "posting pictures of Biden's failed retreat from Afghanistan in 2021 to make a political stab at Trump." Another said, "These images are from 2021 during the botched Afghanistan withdrawal under Biden. Not the win @GavinNewsom thinks it is!"

Democratic influencer Harry Sisson posted the same photos on June 9, and one X user made a video in response, saying, "Those images are soldiers resting on the floor of the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul. That photo was first published Aug. 22, 2021. So that was how Biden treated the troops who were returning from war."

The narrator pointed at a screenshot of an analysis of one of the photos, saying it "appears in official U.S. military releases from Afghanistan." 

But these claims stemmed from erroneous responses from generative artificial intelligence chatbots ChatGPT and Grok.

The San Francisco Chronicle first published the photos Newsom shared, reporting June 9 that dozens of soldiers lacked "adequate sleeping arrangements." The newspaper cited an unnamed source who it said was "directly involved with the deployment."

The newspaper did not identify where the photos were taken, but said it appeared to be in "one or more federal buildings, resting on the floors of what appear to be basements or loading docks." 

One of the earliest replies to Newsom’s X post was from a user who asked, "Why are the pictures so grainy?" and attached a screenshot showing the same inaccurate analysis that said the images showed troops at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul.

The screenshot read: "A set of photos titled ‘Afghanistan Evacuation (image 1 of 3)’ show soldiers and Marines resting on the floor of the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul. The metadata indicates the photo was taken on August 19, 2021 and first posted on August 22, 2021 via DVIDS."

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DVIDS refers to the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service, a source of images, video and print products from service members and commanders made available to the media. PolitiFact searched the website using keywords such as "Hamid Karzai International Airport," "Kabul," and "rest," filtering for photos taken from Aug. 19 to 22, 2021, and found no matches for the two photos.

Reverse image searches, which can help identify the origin of online photos, showed no results for the two photos before June 9.

In a followup X post, the same user who posted the screenshot said she used ChatGPT, used reverse image search and saw the images in the San Francisco Chronicle.

"I didn’t mean to start picture-gate, I just don’t understand how a modern day photo taken in the last 2 days could even be that grainy," she said. "It is now clear that this was not in Afghanistan!"

X’s AI chatbot, Grok, also gave inaccurate responses below posts sharing these photos, linking them to the 2021 U.S. military evacuation in Afghanistan.

Generative AI chatbots are notorious for hallucinating, or providing responses not based in reality. 

Newsom didn’t share outdated photos to claim that service members deployed to Los Angeles in June 2025 are sleeping on the floor. We rate that claim Pants on Fire! ​