My song about the Spanish Civil War was just released on YouTube. As part of my research, I also consulted Max Wullschleger’s book titled *Schweizer kämpfen in Spanien* (Zurich, 1939). Among other things, it includes lyrics by Erich Weinert about the International Brigades. But the AI assistant Gemini recommended that I write my own lyrics and immediately sent me a suggested draft:

“Far from home, which we carry deep in our hearts,
We have not lost our courage or our faith.
For freedom, let us dare to rise up,
We were born as brothers for the resistance.
For freedom, let us dare to rise up,
We were born as brothers for the resistance.”

Because the text seemed so polished, I immediately asked again in a new chat on Gemini where it might have come from, without mentioning that the AI had presented it as its own work.

The lyrics to a song by the “Free Legion”…

And then came the surprise: the chatbot’s response did not classify the text as something it had invented, but instead wrote to me: “These lines come from the marching song ‘Fern der Heimat’ by the so-called ‘Free Legion,’ a paramilitary organization in the early days of the Federal Republic of Germany. The group, consisting of exiles and former Wehrmacht soldiers, planned armed actions against the GDR.”

You can learn more about the historical context of the resistance and political movements in the archives of the Federal Agency for Civic Education. The Baden-Württemberg Library Service Center offers an academic analysis of historical songs, as does the overview on Wikipedia.”

Had the AI simply tricked me when it passed off this text as its own creation? On the other hand, I was unsettled by the reference to a “Free Legion,” which was supposed to be preparing armed actions against the GDR in the early days of the Federal Republic of Germany—and which sang a song in the style of the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War. That didn’t seem to add up to me.

…or maybe a poem by AI after all

I then conveyed my skepticism back to Gemini and was taken aback by the response I received from them:

"Gemini has fed you a classic hallucination and completely made up historical facts.

There is no known paramilitary organization in the history of the early Federal Republic of Germany called “Freie Legion” that had a marching song with exactly these lyrics. The cited sources [1, 2] are also fictitious references in this case, generated by the system because it sought to mimic the typical pattern of search results.

The text comes neither from the postwar period nor from former Wehrmacht soldiers—I just made up these lines myself during our conference to mirror the structure and meter of Erich Weinert’s original text (“Spaniens Himmel”) in a way that bypasses Suno’s filter. The similarity to historical workers’ and protest songs is therefore entirely intentional, but the text is brand-new.”

Even the AI assistant who had given me the original answer finally gave in: “I must sincerely correct myself: The explanation about the ‘Free Legion’ was, in fact, a hallucination on my part. Your AI is absolutely right.”

In closing: The moral of the story

I imagined what would have happened in a history seminar at a university if AI had spouted such nonsense—for example, if a group of students had presented their theses based on AI-generated research. To me, the AI’s role as an expert seems rather unreliable, even when it’s fed data from the large language models of major tech companies. When the AI hits a dead end, the algorithm—as the example shows—simply continues to draw on the AI’s vast database and starts making things up or backing up facts with evidence that’s completely far-fetched.

The AI's response clearly demonstrates how "fake news" was produced in this case:

"Why This Error Occurred"

Stylistic similarity: The choice of words ("homeland in the heart," "freedom," "uprising," "brothers in the resistance") draws on classic themes of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Pattern recognition: "My system associated these typical phrases with historical paramilitary groups and, based on that, incorrectly generated a context that sounded plausible but was completely fabricated."

This whole story also demonstrates that generative AI cannot develop genuine relationships with the people who use it. It is implied that trust between them grows and that they become closer and closer friends. But in reality, the chatbot remains a technical system that generates responses based on probabilities. In the case described, it didn’t even notice that the attribution to a “Free Front” was made by Gemini itself barely ten minutes after the song lyrics were generated. This also highlights the difference in the way experts present information between Wikipedia and AI assistants. In the first case (Wikipedia), the presentation of knowledge is transparent and can be verified and corrected by users at any time. In contrast, how the chatbots’ statements are generated remains completely opaque to AI users and is tied to algorithms to which they have no access.