Newspaper archives still trump answers generated by AI

Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru with a member of the Indian contingent of the United Nations Emergency Force during his visit to Gaza on May 19, 1960. | Photo Credit: The Hindu Photo Archives As I typed in the words, “First Indian leader to visit the Prambanan temple”, in Google search for an article this week, the answer flashed Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the first Indian leader to visit the historic temple. However, I felt a nagging sense of doubt as India and Indonesia have collaborated since the 1940s, both militarily and culturally. To verify, I checked The Hindu’s semantic search which browses through newspaper archives spanning over a century. As reported by The Hindu, on December 14, 1958, India’s President Dr. Rajendra Prasad drove down to Prambanan temple during his official visit to Indonesia. The article titled ‘Monument of Buddha’ noted how Dr. Prasad was impressed by the sight and that he had paid tribute to the renovation work, which was underway with the help of the Archaeological Survey of India.I asked the same question to various Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Grok, and got the same answer — that Mr. Modi was the first Indian leader to visit the shrine.To further analyse the extent of AI’s handicap, I questioned both ChatGPT and Gemini about the “first Indian Prime Minister to visit Palestine”; it answered — Narendra Modi on February 10, 2018, when he visited Ramallah in the West Bank and held talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. However, a look into The Hindu’s archives shows that Jawaharlal Nehru was the first Indian Prime Minister to visit the Gaza Strip on May 19, 1960. In an article dated May 20, 1960, The Hindu recounts how Mr. Nehru made a one-day trip to the United Nations Emergency Force and Palestinian refugee camps during his official visit to the United Arab Republic (UAR) (a short-lived union of Egypt and Syria). His visit was marred by Israeli Super-Mystere fighter jets circling over the United Nations flight carrying him to Gaza — a violation of the airspace of Palestine which had then been under the UAR’s military control. A look into the results given by the AI tools shows that in spite of several newspaper reports of Mr. Nehru’s visit, AI challenged its veracity as Mr. Nehru’s visit was to Gaza — then occupied by the UAR. It chose to classify Mr. Modi’s visit to Ramallah as the first instance as it was governed by the Palestinian Authority. However, India had recognised both Palestine (comprising the Gaza Strip and the West Bank) and Israel in 1948 itself. With the changing nature of the governing authority in both the West Bank and Gaza throughout the years, a visit to either territory by a state head has to be taken into account.A final example which highlights AI’s limitation came when I posed this query to Gemini and ChatGPT: “Have U.S. senators or Congressmen visited Ram temple in Ayodhya”. Gemini stated that there is no public record or official confirmation of any current or former U.S. Senator or U.S. Congressman having physically visited the temple, while ChatGPT erroneously stated that a U.S. Congressional delegation visited the temple in 2024.The Hindu’s archival search shows that a nine-member delegation of U.S. Senators visited the Ram Janmabhoomi complex on November 3, 1993, almost a year after the Babri Masjid was demolished. Accompanied by leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the delegation led by Steven Morse visited the make-shift tent at the site housing Ram Lalla. Mr. Morse clarified that their visit was “to study the democratic functioning and culture of the country” and not for political purposes.In spite of AI’s continued learning, archives of century-old newspapers like The Hindu present facts without the filter of an algorithm tailored around the user’s preferences, political ideology and search patterns. The above examples show AI’s lack of fact-checking, limited access to older news reports, and failure to remain unbiased. It stresses the need for legacy newspapers to provide more digital reports highlighting its old journalism in order to set the record straight. Published - July 31, 2026 12:35 am IST