LLMMedium
Google Healthcare AI Model Med‑Gemini Allegedly Produces Non‑Existent 'Basilar Ganglia' Term in Published Output
- Occurred
- May 6, 2024
- Published
- Aug 4, 2025
- Source
- AI Incident Database
Summary
Google’s Med‑Gemini healthcare AI reportedly produced the non‑existent term "basilar ganglia" in public launch materials, conflating two distinct brain structures. The error reportedly appeared in both a blog post and an arXiv preprint. Google is reported to have initially edited the blog without acknowledgment, later calling it a typo.
Developers
Deployers
Harmed parties
- Patients whose care could be affected by undetected AI hallucinations
- Medical research community citing or using erroneous AI outputs
- Healthcare professionals relying on AI‑generated diagnostic content
Tags
- Hallucination
- Medical AI error
- Diagnostic terminology fabrication
- Healthcare AI risk
- Radiology report generation
- Automation bias in medicine
- High‑stakes AI failure
- Medical research publication error
- Clinical decision‑making risk
Classification
Category confidence: 90%
Severity confidence: 85%
Rationale: AI model hallucinated a non-existent medical term in public documentation, representing a notable failure without immediate physical harm.
Classifier: Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-FP8