ZDF said its journalist Nicola Albrecht, 50, used video taken from the internet in a report on children terrified by US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement operations.
One clip was AI-generated and not labelled as such, and another in fact showed a Florida arrest from 2022.
"The damage caused by disregarding journalistic rules is considerable," ZDF editor-in-chief Bettina Schausten said in a statement. "At its core, this is about the credibility of our reporting."
Albrecht's original report broadcast on February 13 was accurate, ZDF said, but an updated version broadcast on the February 15 edition of the flagship nightly news programme contained the two misleading clips.
Presenter Dunja Hayali had introduced the segment saying the Trump administration's immigration raids had created "a climate of fear that doesn't even stop at children".
One clip could be seen to feature the watermark of Sora, OpenAI's platform that generates short video clips based on prompts.
"The AI-generated material should not have been used without journalistic justification and without being categorised according to ZDF's internal rules for the use of AI-generated material," the broadcaster said.
Journalists have been caught out before by synthetic content.
Publications including Wired and Business Insider in August withdrew features purportedly written by a freelance journalist following concerns they were in fact written using generative artificial intelligence.
In January, AFP factcheckers found that an image carried by ZDF purporting to show former Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro after his capture by US soldiers was AI-generated.
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