You’ve probably seen the story by now. A school in Kentucky sent students home with a bound agenda that included absurd errors clearly made by AI. The periodic table was nonsense. The map of the U.S. lists the state of Illinois as “Vitoiis,” and Kentucky is listed as “Venecky.” There’s an extra planet called Marc, and Saturn is listed as “Sature,” among countless other gibberish errors.
But our big question after looking at this story is one we haven’t discovered an answer to yet. What AI chatbot were they using to create such ridiculous graphics? And perhaps more importantly, why did no human catch this before it was distributed to students?
The story was first reported by local Louisville news outlet WDRB, which has a hilarious (but depressing) video about the AI-generated mistakes in the Farnsley Middle School agenda. WDRB didn’t receive a proper explanation from the school district except to say that “they are communicating with parents about the issue,” nor did they get an answer about whether this was isolated to one school or the entire district.
The map is so bad it inspired us to try it out for ourselves using the major AI chatbots. OpenAI’s ChatGPT, xAI’s Grok, and Anthropic’s Claude all generated accurate maps of the U.S. with names, though Claude labeled them with abbreviations rather than the full names of each state. The periodic tables created by each also looked accurate. But things didn’t go so well when we tried Google’s Gemini, which uses Nano Banana for image creation.
As everyone knows, Montana is just west of the great state of Nontana. And we hear the Sork coast is lovely this time of year.
So which AI chatbot did the folks at Farnsley Middle School use to create their own abominations? Maybe they used Google. Another possibility is that they used another of the major AI image generators from a year or so ago and had these graphics lying around for some time. These kinds of mistakes were much more common then, though clearly there are still examples in 2026. The U.S. State Department recently presented a map of Africa that included incorrect placement of country names.
Another possibility is that the school district in Louisville is using some kind of AI tool that is much more obscure and perhaps sold to the school district as a specialized software package. We just don’t know and the school district seems reluctant to speak with the press about the issue.
The school district’s website includes a section on AI that insists: “We view GenAI not as a replacement for human intellect or the invaluable role of educators, but as a powerful tool to enhance learning, teaching, and operational efficiencies.” The problem is that whatever tool was used here, the educators didn’t use AI as a tool. They used it as a replacement for any critical thinking at all.
Even if AI spits out something this horrible, you can’t really blame the AI when something like this reaches students. It’s a bit like trying to blame Google if you found something on a sketchy website while doing a basic search and passing it directly to students without fact-checking any of it. At some point, the human adult who laid eyes on the information or image needs to recognize that it’s wrong and not hand it to kids.
The problem may be much more deeply rooted than the one person who created the agenda. The school district’s website includes AI slop featuring kids with too many fingers, phones with nonsensical designs, and tablets that hover in front of students.
Apparently this school district is way ahead of the curve in ways we never thought possible. They didn’t just create new state names and radically alter the periodic table. They invented antigravity.
The school district didn’t respond to questions emailed Tuesday afternoon. Gizmodo will update this article if we hear back. And if you know which AI chatbot may have been used to create this garbage, please do let us know in the comments.
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