Did a photo of troops sleeping on a floor, shared amid President Donald Trump's deployment of the National Guard in California in June 2025, in fact date to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021? No, that's not true: the AI chatbot ChatGPT made a mistake in identifying the photo as having first been published on a U.S. military website in August 2021. The picture was published by the San Francisco Chronicle in June 2025.
On June 9, 2025, the San Francisco Chronicle published a set of two photographs which the newspaper described as showing National Guard troops sleeping on floors, after being deployed to California by Trump amid anti-immigration enforcement protests in Los Angeles in June 2025.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom then re-posted the photos on X, claiming that they showed the troops "being forced to sleep on the floor, piled on top of one another":
(Source: X screenshot)
In reply to Newsom, another user posted (archived here) a screenshot of a response by ChatGPT to a question about the authenticity and origins of the pictures. In that response, the AI chatbot stated that one of the photos had been online since August 2021:
(Source: X screenshot)
DVIDS is the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service, and is overseen by the U.S. Department of Defense. Its website, DVIDSHub.net, is a repository for U.S. military related photographs and videos.
Neither of the "sleeping troops" photographs were first published online on DVIDSHub.net in 2021, and that claim was false -- the result of an easily provable error by ChatGPT.
Lead Stories searched DVIDSHub.net for all photographs labelled "Afghanistan Evacuation" and published on August 22, 2021, a search that yielded 78 images. The two "sleeping troops" photographs published by the Chronicle and posted by Newsom, in June 2025, did not feature among those 78 images:
The answer provided by ChatGPT -- that one or both of the pictures had been online since August 22, 2021 and showed troops in Afghanistan -- was therefore false.
Lead Stories performed a reverse image search for each of the "sleeping troops" photos and found no results that dated to before June 9, 2025, when the San Francisco Chronicle published them.
