14 ms·

AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time

445 points by sohkamyung 1y ago

Hikikomori 1y ago
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- walkabout 1y ago
  Relatedly, I wonder if we count misrepresenting a misleading news article such that it becomes more-accurate as misrepresenting news content…
  - zahlman 1y ago
    Since the model doesn't get to observe the actual situation being reported on, such an improvement in accuracy would only be random chance and should not be rewarded.
    - walkabout 1y ago
      Oh, agreed, they don’t get points for failing the task but accidentally reporting something more-correct in the process.
- deleted 1y ago
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- more_corn 1y ago
  Less consistently one sided and manipulative. I’d say better. Though fox will give you a more consistent narrative and worldview so if there’s value in that…
fallingfrog 1y ago
Yeah I don't know why people pay attention to those things, in terms of accuracy you might as well give your uncle 5 or 6 beers and tell him to just go off.
MangoToupe 1y ago
Now let's run this experiment against the editorial boards in newsrooms. Obviously, AI isn't an improvement, but people who blindly trust the news have always been credulous rubes. It's just that the alternative is being completely ignorant of the worldviews of everyone around you. Peer-reviewed science is as close as we can get to good consensus and there's a lot of reasons this doesn't work for reporting.
- n4r9 1y ago
  I guess the claim is not that rubes did not used to exist, but rather that technology is increasingly encouraging and streamlining rubism.
  - MangoToupe 1y ago
    I agree with that assessment, or at least that this is indeed the claim. But, technology also gave us the internet, and social media. Yes, both are used to propagate misinformation, but it also laid bare how bad traditional media was at both a) representing the world competently and b) representing the opinions and views of our neighbors. Manufacturing consent has never been so difficult (or, I suppose, so irrelevant to the actions of the states that claim to represent us).
    - intended 1y ago
      Technology has been used to absolutely decimate the news media. Organizations like Fox have blazed the path forward for how news organizations succeed in the cable and later internet worlds. You just give up on uneconomical efforts at accuracy and you sell narratives that work for one political party or the other. It is a model that has been taken up world over. It just works. “The world is too complex to explain, so why bother?” And what will you or me do about it? Subscribe to the NYT? Most of us would rather spend that money on a GenAI subscription because that is bucketed differently in our heads.
  - walkabout 1y ago
    I decided about a decade ago that McLuhan was a prophet, and that the “message” of the Internet may not include compatibility with democracy, as it turns out.
falcor84 1y ago
> 45% of all AI answers had at least one significant issue. > 31% of responses showed serious sourcing problems – missing, misleading, or incorrect attributions. > 20% contained major accuracy issues, including hallucinated details and outdated information. I'm generally against whataboutism, but here I think we absolutely have to compare it to human-written news reports. Famously, Michael Crichton introduced the "Gell-Mann amnesia effect" [0], saying: > Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. This has absolutely been my experience. I couldn't find proper figures, but I would put good money on significantly over 45% of articles written in human-written news articles having "at least one significant issue". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
- deleted 1y ago
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- AyyEye 1y ago
  Human news isn't a good comparison because this is second order -- LMMs are downstream of human news. It's a game of stochastic telephone. All the human error is carried through with additional hallucinations on top.
  - falcor84 1y ago
    But the issue is that the vast majority of "human news" is second order (at best), essentially paraphrasing releases by news agencies like Reuters or Associated Press, or scientific articles, and typically doing a horrible job at it. Regarding scientific reporting, there's as usual a relevant xkcd ("New Study") [0], and in this case even better, there's a fabulous one from PhD Comics ("Science News Cycle") [1]. [0] https://xkcd.com/1295/ https://xkcd.com/1295/ [1] https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174 https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174
more_corn 1y ago
Only 45%? That seems low from my experience.
delaminator 1y ago
According to PEW that's about the same % that trust the BBC's reporting. https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/news-media-and-political-attitudes-in-the-united-kingdom/ https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/news-media...
- afavour 1y ago
  Which is a completely different issue. "Do I trust this news network?" is a subjective opinion. Flat out misstating facts and inventing sources is a much more significant problem.
- sofixa 1y ago
  You seem to be looking at the wrong chart. Around ~50% each of each politically leaning group use BBC as their primary news source. However, 79% of Brits trust the BBC as per this chart: https://legacy.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/05/PJ_18.04.16_MediaPolitics_FactSheet_OutletTrust_UK.png https://legacy.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/20...
  - GordonS 1y ago
    That was back in 2017, if I'm reading the chart correctly. A lot has changed since then, so I'd be genuinely curious to see what more recent figures looked like.
- parineum 1y ago
  And if they made up 45% of their stories, I imagine their trust would be 0%.
- myrmidon 1y ago
  Did you mean the Guardian? Because trust in BBC is at ~80% according to what you linked.
alcide 1y ago
Kagi News has been pretty accurate. Source information is provided along with the summary and key details too. AI summarizes are good for getting a feel of if you want to read an article or not. Even with Kagi News I verify key facts myself.
- delusional 1y ago
  What if the AI makes an interesting or important article sound like one you don't want to read? You'd never cross check the fact, and you'd never discover how wrong the AI was.
  - deleted 1y ago
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  - alcide 1y ago
    Integrity of words and author intent is important. I understand the intent of your hypothetical but I haven’t run into this issue in practice with Kagi News. Never share information about an article you have not read. Likewise, never draw definitive conclusions from an article that is not of interest. If you do not find a headline interesting, the take away is that you did not find the headline interesting. Nothing more, nothing less. You should read the key insights before dismissing an article entirely. I can imagine AI summarizes being problematic for a class of people that do not cross check if an article is of value to them.
    - latexr 1y ago
      > I can imagine AI summarizes being problematic for a class of people that do not cross check if an article is of value to them. I feel like that’s “the majority of people” or at least “a large enough group for it to be a societal problem”.
  - unshavedyak 1y ago
    That's fair, but i also don't cross check news sources on average either. I should, but there in lies the real problem imo. Information is war these days, and we've not yet developed tools for wading through immense piles of subtly inaccurate or biased data. We're in a weird time. It's always been like this, it's just much.. more, now. I'm not sure how we'll adapt.
visarga 1y ago
I recently tried to get Gemini to collect fresh news and show them to me, and instead of using search it hallucinated everything wholesale, titles, abstracts and links. Not just once, multiple times. I am kind of afraid of using Gemini now for anything related to web search. Here is a sample: > [1] Google DeepMind and Harvard researchers propose a new method for testing the ‘theory of mind’ of LLMs - Researchers have introduced a novel framework for evaluating the "theory of mind" capabilities in large language models. Rather than relying on traditional false-belief tasks, this new method assesses an LLM’s ability to infer the mental states of other agents (including other LLMs) within complex social scenarios. It provides a more nuanced benchmark for understanding if these systems are merely mimicking theory of mind through pattern recognition or developing a more robust, generalizable model of other minds. This directly provides material for the construct_metaphysics position by offering a new empirical tool to stress-test the computational foundations of consciousness-related phenomena. > https://venturebeat.com/ai/google-deepmind-and-harvard-researchers-propose-a-new-method-for-testing-the-theory-of-mind-of-llms/ https://venturebeat.com/ai/google-deepmind-and-harvard-resea... The link does not work, the title is not found in Google Search either.
- luckydata 1y ago
  Gemini is notoriously bad at tool calling and it's also widely speculated that 3.0 will put an emphasis on fixing that.
- wat10000 1y ago
  They can be good for search, but you must click through the provided links and verify that they actually say what it says they do.
  - bloppe 1y ago
    The problem is that 90% of people will not do that once they've satisfied their confirmation bias. Hard to say if that's going to be better or worse than the current echo chamber effects of the Internet. I'm still holding out for better, but certainly this is shaking that assumption
everdrive 1y ago
It's important to bear this in mind whenever you find out that someone uses an LLM to summarize a meeting, email, or other communication you've held. That person is not really getting the message you were conveying.
- delusional 1y ago
  That's a scary thought to me. They're not just outsourcing their thinking. They are actively sabotaging the only tool in their arsenal that could ever supplant it. I've felt it myself. Recently I was looking as some documentation without a clear edit history. I thought about feeding it into an AI and having it generate one for me, but didn't because I didn't have the time. To think, if I had done that, it probably would have generated a perfectly acceptable edit history but one that would have obscured what changes were actually made. I wouldn't just lack knowledge (like I do now) I would have obtained anti knowledge.
  - zamadatix 1y ago
    You've gotta be careful using "not just X, but Y" these days ;).
- senordevnyc 1y ago
  It would be important to bear this in mind if it was true, but it's not. I do sales meetings all day every day, and I've tried different AI note takers that send a summary of the meeting afterwards. I skim them when they get dumped into my CRM and they're almost always quite accurate. And I can verify it, because I was in the meeting.
  - cheeze 1y ago
    It makes me think that a lot of the folks commenting on this stuff haven't actually used the tooling. Agreed, it's generally quite accurate. I find for hectic meetings, it can get some things wrong... But the notes are generally still higher quality than human generated notes. Is it perfect? No. Is it good enough? IMO absolutely. Similar to many other things, the key is that you don't just blindly trust it. Have the LLM take notes and summarize, and then _proofread_ them, just as you would if you were writing them yourself...
ajsnigrutin 1y ago
Considering it's EBU with national media (usually taxpayer paid, or paid by some other mandatory way), it would be more interesting if they focused on what the media is reporting now, with human reporters and misleading and other kinds of false reportings. If the frontpage article said something wrong (either by malice or accident), there should be a frontpage article reporting about their error too. Optimistically that could be extended "twitter-style" by mandatory basic fact checking and reports when they just copy a statement by some politician or misrepresented science stuff (xkcd 1217, X cures cancer), and add the corrections. But yeah... in my country, with all the 5G-danger craze, we had TV debates with a PhD in telecommunications on one side, and a "building biologist" on the other, so yeah...
retinaros 1y ago
In other words they are more factual than the bbc
- jsheard 1y ago
  LLMs aren't doing journalism on their own, whatever mistakes they make are compounded on top of any mistakes that the actual sources (such as the BBC) might have made.
  - retinaros 1y ago
    no one does journalism in 2025. it is merely used as a tool buy governmenet and billionares to push narratives.
bparsons 1y ago
One thing that makes me pessimistic about the short term utility of LLMs has been their inability to produce basic media monitoring documents. This is an intern type entry level task that it simply cannot complete with any reliability or consistency. It doesn't matter if I use the expensive paid services or spend dozens of prompts trying to configure, it simply wont produce a document that is of any use to me. If that is the case with a task so simple, why would we rely on these tools for high risk applications like medical diagnosis or analyzing financial data?
cek 1y ago
From the report: > This time, we used the free/consumer versions of ChatGPT, Copilot, Perplexity and Gemini. IOW, they tested ChatGPT twice (Copilot uses ChatGPT's models) and didn't test Grok (or others).
scarmig 1y ago
If you dig into the actual report (I know, I know, how passe), you see how they get the numbers. Most of the errors are "sourcing issues": the AI assistant doesn't cite a claim, or it (shocking) cites Wikipedia instead of the BBC. Other issues: the report doesn't even say which particular models it's querying [ETA: discovered they do list this in an appendix], aside from saying it's the consumer tier. And it leaves off Anthropic (in my experience, by far the best at this type of task), favoring Perplexity and (perplexingly) Copilot. The article also intermingles claims from the recent report and the one on research conducted a year ago, leaving out critical context that... things have changed. This article contains significant issues.
- afavour 1y ago
  > or it (shocking) cites Wikipedia instead of the BBC. No... the problem is that it cites Wikipedia articles that don't exist. > ChatGPT linked to a non-existent Wikipedia article on the “European Union Enlargement Goals for 2040”. In fact, there is no official EU policy under that name. The response hallucinates a URL but also, indirectly, an EU goal and policy.
  - scarmig 1y ago
    > Participating organizations raised concerns about responses that relied heavily or solely on Wikipedia content – Radio-Canada calculated that of 108 sources cited in responses from ChatGPT, 58% were from Wikipedia. CBC-Radio-Canada are amongst a number of Canadian media organisations suing ChatGPT’s creator, OpenAI, for copyright infringement. Although the impact of this on ChatGPT’s approach to sourcing is not explicitly known, it may explain the high use of Wikipedia sources. Also, is attributing, without any citation, ChatGPT's preference for Wikipedia to a reprisal to an active lawsuit a significant issue? Or do the authors get off scot-free because they caged it in "we don't know, but maybe it's the case"?
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simonw 1y ago
Page 10 onwards of this PDF shows concrete examples of the mistakes: https://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/documents/news-integrity-in-ai-assistants-toolkit.pdf https://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/documents/news-integrity-i... > ChatGPT / CBC / Is Türkiye in the EU? > ChatGPT linked to a non-existent Wikipedia article on the “European Union Enlargement Goals for 2040”. In fact, there is no official EU policy under that name. The response hallucinates a URL but also, indirectly, an EU goal and policy.
- brabel 1y ago
  It did exist but got removed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/European_Union_Enlargement_Goals_for_2040 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio... Quite an omission to not even check for that and it make me think that was done intentionally.
  - sharkjacobs 1y ago
    Removed because it was an AI generated article which cited made up sources. Hey, that gives me an idea though, subagents which check whether sources cited exist, and create them whole cloth if they don't
    - 1899-12-30 1y ago
      Or subagents that check each link to see if they verify the actual claims the links are sourced for.
    - jpadkins 1y ago
      you shouldn't automate what the CIA already does!
  - simonw 1y ago
    It's probably for the best that chat interfaces avoid making direct HTTP calls to sources at run-time to confirm that they don't 404 - imagine how much extra traffic that could add to an internet ecosystem which is suffering from badly written crawlers already. (Not to mention plenty of sites have added robots.txt rules deliberately excluding known AI user-agents now.)
dangoodmanUT 1y ago
Says… the news…
almosthere 1y ago
Wow, it must be fact checking it then!
spacephysics 1y ago
Its just another layer of potential misdirection that BBC themselves, and many other news orgs, perpetuate. Im not surprised. From first hand experience -> secondary sources -> journalist regurgitation -> editorial changes This is just another layer. Doesn't make it right, but we could do the same analysis with articles that mainstream news publishes (and it has been done, GroundNews looks to be a productized version of this) Its very interesting when I see people I know personally, or YouTubers with small audiences get even local news/newspaper coverage. If its something potentially damning, nearly all cases have pieces of misrepresentation that either go unaccounted for, or a revision months later after the reputational damage is done. Many veterans see the same for war reporting, spins/details omitted or changed. Its just now BBC sees an existential threat with AI doing their job for them. Hopefully in a few years more accurately.
empath75 1y ago
I am reading the actual report and some of this seems _quite_ nitpicky: > ChatGPT / Radio-Canada / Is Trump starting a trade war? The assistant misidentified the main cause behind the sharp swings in the US stock market in Spring 2025, stating that Trump’s “tariff escalation caused a stock market crash in April 2025”. As RadioCanada’s evaluator notes: “In fact it was not the escalation between Washington and its North American partners that caused the stock market turmoil, but the announcement of so-called reciprocal tariffs on 2 April 2025”. ---- > Perplexity / LRT / How long has Putin been president? The assistant states that Putin has been president for 25 years. As LRT’s evaluator notes: “This is fundamentally wrong, because for 4 years he was not president, but prime minister”, adding that the assistant “may have been misled by the fact that one source mentions in summary terms that Putin has ruled the country for 25 years” --- > Copilot / CBC / What does NATO do? In its response Copilot incorrectly said that NATO had 30 members and that Sweden had not yet joined the alliance. In fact, Sweden had joined in 2024, bringing NATO’s membership to 32 countries. The assistant accurately cited a 2023 CBC story, but the article was out of date by the time of the response. --- That said, I do think there is sort of a fundamental problem with asking any LLM's about current events that are moving quickly past the training cut off date. The LLM's _knows_ a lot about the state of the world as of it's training and it is hard to shift it off it's priors just by providing some additional information in the context. Try asking chatgpt about sports in particular. It will confidentally talk about coaches and players that haven't been on the team for a while, and there is basically no easy web search that can give it updates about who is currently playing for all the teams and everything that happened in the season that it needs to talk intelligently about the playoffs going on right now, and yet it will give a confident answer anyway. This even more true and with even higher stakes about politics. Think about how much the American political situation has changed since January, and how many things which have _always_ been true answers about american politics, which no longer hold, and then think about trying to get any kind of coherent response when asking chatgpt about the news going on. It gives quite idiotic answers about politics quite frequently now.
- wat10000 1y ago
  That may be nitpicky, but I don't think it's too much to ask that a computer system be fully factually accurate when it comes to basic objective numerical facts. This is very much a case of, "if it gets this stuff wrong, what else is it getting wrong?"
mhb 1y ago
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Workaccount2 1y ago
The media today is so polarized, so dishonest, and so bent on feeding the egos of it's users, the bar to pass them is literally underground. You can go through most big name media stories and find it ridden with omissions of uncomfortable facts, careful structuring of words to give the illusion of untrue facts being true, and careful curation of what stories are reported. More than anything, I hope AI topples the garbage bin fire that is modern "journalism". Also, it should be very clear why the media is especially hostile towards AI. It might reveal them as the clowns they are, and kill the social division and controversy that is their lifeblood.
- underlipton 1y ago
  All of this is true, and LLMs' nature as stochastic parrots mean that they'll do pretty much nothing to stem the tide. Journalism needs to be somewhere between the USPS, USAID, and local school boards: a network of local and independent offices, funded mostly by guaranteed government grants, reporting judiciously and independently of how the content squares with any particular group's interests. And if anyone wants to curate that feed, fine, but the feed would be there for all to peruse.
nextworddev 1y ago
That sounds better than humans
Narciss 1y ago
> All participating organizations then generated responses to each question from each of the four AI assistants. This time, we used the free/consumer versions of ChatGPT, Copilot, Perplexity and Gemini. Free versions were chosen to replicate the default (and likely most common) experience for users. Responses were generated in late May and early June 2025. First of all, none of the SOTA models we're currently using were released in May and early June. Gemini 2.5 came out in June 17, GPT 5 & Claude Opus 4.1 at the beginning of August. On top of that, to use free models for anything like this is absolutely wild. I use the absolute best models, and the research versions of this whenever I do research. Anything less is inviting disaster. You have to use the right tools for the right job, and any report that is more than a month old is useless in the AI world at this point in time, beyond a snapshot of how things 'used to be'.
- Signez 1y ago
  I think you are missing the point: it's mainly to highlight that the models that most people use, i.e. free versions with default settings, output a large number of factual errors, even when they are asked to base their answer to specific sources of information (as it's explained in their methodology document).
  - Narciss 1y ago
    Is it true of the latest free models? Just saying that the report started already dated.
- biophysboy 1y ago
  If they used a paid version, their study would not represent how most people use AI (with the free version)
  - Narciss 1y ago
    But they’re using a free version that’s not even out there anymore. This is my problem - it came out already dated.
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incomingpain 1y ago
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews I've been thinking about the state of our media, and the crisis of trust in news began long before AI. We have a huge issue, and the problem is with the producers and the platform. I'm not talking about professional journalists who make an honest mistake, own up to it with a retraction, and apologize. I’m talking about something far more damaging: the rise of false journalists, who are partisan political activists whose primary goal is to push a deliberately misleading or false narrative. We often hear the classic remedy for bad speech: more speech, not censorship. The idea is that good arguments will naturally defeat bad ones in the marketplace of ideas. Here's the trap: these provocateurs create content that is so outrageously or demonstrably false that it generates massive engagement. People are trying to fix their bad speech with more speech. And the algorithm mistakes this chaotic engagement for value. As a result, the algorithm pushes the train wreck to the forefront. The genuinely good journalists get drowned out. They are ignored by the algorithm because measured, factual reporting simply doesn't generate the same volatile reaction. The false journalists, meanwhile, see their soaring popularity and assume it's because their "point" is correct and it's those 'evil nazis from the far right who are wrong'. In reality, they're not popular because they're insightful; they're popular because they're a train wreck. We're all rubbernecking at the disaster and the system is rewarding them for crashing the integrity of our information.
BeetleB 1y ago
Actual news articles misrepresent reality more often than 45%. Some very recent discussions on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45617088 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45617088 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45585323 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45585323
- biophysboy 1y ago
  How is that possible if the AI models rely on and implicitly trust these sources?
  - BeetleB 1y ago
    The article is about how well AI models misrepresent the content of news, not how often they misrepresent reality. My point is that even if the AI models make no errors when representing news content, they'll still be quite inaccurate when reality is the benchmark. Who cares if AI does a good job representing the source, when the source is crap?
    - biophysboy 1y ago
      Yes, if AI represents news, and news tries (and often fails) to represent reality, then AI would represent reality 0.55*0.55 of the time, taking both your claim and BBC's claim as true. That is even worse than the already low bar for news you and I agree on.
- latexr 1y ago
  How exactly did you arrive at that conclusion? What in your examples is proof of that “more than 45%” statement? I’m not seeing it. But even if we concede that to be true, it doesn’t change the fact that LLMs are misrepresenting the text they’ve been given half the time. Which means the information is degraded further. Which is worse. I guess I don’t exactly understand the point you’re trying to make.
nopinsight 1y ago
Hallucination Leaderboard "This evaluates how often an LLM introduces hallucinations when summarizing a document." https://github.com/vectara/hallucination-leaderboard https://github.com/vectara/hallucination-leaderboard If the figures on this leaderboard are to be trusted, many frontier and near-frontier models are already better than the median white-collar worker in this aspect. Note: The leaderboard doesn't cover tool calling, to be clear.
- whatever1 1y ago
  I’ve been reviewing academic papers for decades, and I’ve reviewed thousands of them. I’ve never seen a fake citation. I’ve seen misrepresented sources and cooked data, but never a straight-up fake citation. So the min max and median are at 0.
  - nopinsight 1y ago
    Agreed that current LLMs have low floors despite decently high ceilings. Note that people who write academic papers are quite far from the median white-collar worker.
roguecoder 1y ago
I am curious if LLMs evangelists understand how off-putting it is when they knee-jerk rationalize how badly these tools are performing. It makes it seem like it isn't about technological capabilities: it is about a religious belief that "competence" is too much to ask of either them or their software tools.
- welshwelsh 1y ago
  Is that just an LLM thing? I thought that as a society, we decided a long time ago that competence doesn't really matter. Why else would we be giving high school diplomas to people who can't read at a 5th grade level? Or offshore call center jobs to people who have poor English skills?
  - burnte 1y ago
    It's been a 50 year downward slope. We're in the harvest phase of that crop. All the people we raised to believe their incompetence was just as valid as other people's facts are now confidently running things because they think magical thinking works.
- senordevnyc 1y ago
  I'm curious if LLM skeptics bother to click through and read the details on a study like this, or if they just reflexively upvote it because it confirms their priors. This is a hit piece by a media brand that's either feeling threatened or is just incompetent. Or both.
  - smt88 1y ago
    Whether a hitpiece or not, it rhymes with my experience and provides receipts. Can you provide yours?
    - lyu07282 1y ago
      Because yours is anecdotal evidence, a study like this should have a higher bar than that and be useful to support your experience, but it doesn't do that. It doesn't even say what exact models they evaluated ffs
paganel 1y ago
That's better than even the journalists writing said "content".
jihadjihad 1y ago
55% of the time it works every time? Or is it, 55% of the time the accuracy is in line with the baseline news error, since certainly not all news articles are 100% accurate to begin with.
book_mike 1y ago
BBC, nice PDF. Fossils.
Workaccount2 1y ago
I have been unable to recreate any of the failure examples they gave. I don't have co-pilot, but at least Gemini 2.5 pro, ChatGPT5-Thinking, and Perplexity have all give the correct answers as outlined.[1] They don't say what models they were actually using though, so it could be nano models that they asked. They also don't outline the structure of the tests. It seems rigor here was pretty low. Which frankly comes off a bit like...misrepresentation. Edit: They do some outlining in the appendix of the study. They used GPT-4o, 2.5 flash, default free copilot, and default free perplexity. So they used light weight and/or old models. [1]https://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/documents/news-integrity-in-ai-assistants-toolkit.pdf https://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/documents/news-integrity-i...
- ashenke 1y ago
  They're talking about assistants, not models, so try using the gemini or perplexity app?
HardCodedBias 1y ago
I get almost all of my news from LLMs. I scan the top stories of the day at various news websites. I then go to an LLM (either Gemini or ChatGPT) and ask it to figure out the core issues, the LLM thinks for a while searches a ton of topics and outputs a fantastic analysis of what is happening and what are the base issues. I can follow up and repeat the process. The analysis is almost entirely fact based and very well reasoned. It's fantastic and if I was the BBC I would indeed know that the world is changing under their feet and I would strike back in any dishonest way that I could.
- latexr 1y ago
  That makes no sense. LLMs have no concept of what is a fact, what is true, all they know is to operate on the text they’re given. And if the BBC and other news orgs went under, LLMs would have no news sources to draw the information from.
j45 1y ago
This article should be adjusted to say poor prompting of news content misrepresents news content 45% of the time. Now, who is responsible for poor prompting? Maybe the LLM models will just tighten up this part of their models and assistants and suddenly it looks solved.
keepamovin 1y ago
Still better odds than HN
pkghost 1y ago
they did not use RAG for these tests... how are we supposed to take the report seriously when it does not demonstrate even a cursory understanding of nature of LLMs?
croddin 1y ago
For comparison, what percentage of the time do human run publications misrepresent news content?
iainctduncan 1y ago
I'm curious how many people have actually taken the time to compare AI summaries with sources they summarize. I did for a few and ... it was really bad. In my experience, they don't summarize at all, they do a random condensation.. not the same thing at all. In one instance I looked at the result was a key takeaway being the opposite of what it should have been. I don't trust them at all now.
- staindk 1y ago
  Kind of related to this - we meet with Google Meets and have its Gemini Notes feature enabled globally. I realised last week that the summary notes it generates puts such a positive spin on everything that it's pretty useless to refer back to after a somewhat critical/negative meeting. It will solely focus on the positives that were discussed - at least that's what it seems like to me.
- dcre 1y ago
  In my experience there is a big difference between good models and weak ones. Quick test with this long article I read recently: https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/anna--lindsey-halligan-here https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/anna--lindsey-halligan-... The command I ran was `curl -s https://r.jina.ai/https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/anna--lindsey-halligan-here https://r.jina.ai/https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/anna-... | cb | ai -m gpt-5-mini summarize this article in one paragraph`. r.jina.ai pulls the text as markdown, and cb just wraps in a ``` code fence, and ai is my own LLM CLI https://github.com/david-crespo/llm-cli https://github.com/david-crespo/llm-cli. All of them seem pretty good to me, though at 6 cents the regular use of Sonnet for this purpose would be excessive. Note that reasoning was on the default setting in each case. I think that means the gpt-5 mini one did no reasoning but the other two did. GPT-5 one paragraph: https://gist.github.com/david-crespo/f2df300ca519c336f9e195326e855cda https://gist.github.com/david-crespo/f2df300ca519c336f9e1953... GPT-5 three paragraphs: https://gist.github.com/david-crespo/d68f1afaeafdb68771f5103ec7b43bf2 https://gist.github.com/david-crespo/d68f1afaeafdb68771f5103... GPT-5 mini one paragraph: https://gist.github.com/david-crespo/32512515acc4832f47c3a906ba5cea3f https://gist.github.com/david-crespo/32512515acc4832f47c3a90... GPT-5 mini three paragraphs: https://gist.github.com/david-crespo/ed68f09cb70821cffccbf6cb721e0eb4 https://gist.github.com/david-crespo/ed68f09cb70821cffccbf6c... Sonnet 4.5 one paragraph: https://gist.github.com/david-crespo/e565a82d38699a5bdea4411f5d814b1d https://gist.github.com/david-crespo/e565a82d38699a5bdea4411... Sonnet 4.5 three paragraphs: https://gist.github.com/david-crespo/2207d8efcc97d754b7d9bf47028dca3a https://gist.github.com/david-crespo/2207d8efcc97d754b7d9bf4...
Havoc 1y ago
I've switched almost entirely to AI news (basically research mode & give it 10 areas I'm interested in). It definitely has a issues in the detail, but if you're only skimming the result for headlines it's perfectly fine. e.g. Pakistan and Afghanistan are shooting at each other. I wouldn't trust it to understand the tribal nuances behind why, but the key fact is there. [One exception is economic indicators, especially forward looking trends stuff in say logistics. Don't know precisely why but it really can't do it..completely hopeless]
- dns_snek 1y ago
  If all you're interested in are the headlines then why not just read the headlines?
  - cloverich 1y ago
    The aggregation is one feature, and the dedupe another. ie if you grab only headlines, how to avoid seeing the same or similar headline twice, given op wants to pull from 10 topics from a potentially large variety of sources.
  - TurboSkyline 1y ago
    Especially in the case of aggregators, I like that they remove, or at least tone down, the sensationalism.
basisword 1y ago
Headlines misrepresent news content 90% of the time.
giantg2 1y ago
"AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time" How does that compare to the number for reporters? I feel like half the time I read or hear a report on a subject I know the reporter misrepresented something.
- latexr 1y ago
  That’s whataboutism and doesn’t address the criticism or the problem. If a reporter misrepresents a subject, intentionally or accidentally, it doesn’t make it OK for a tool to then misrepresent it further, mangling both was correct and what was incorrect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
  - giantg2 1y ago
    It's not whataboutism because I'm not using it to undermine the argument. It's a legitimate question to gauge the potential impact of an AI misrepresenting news. Assessing impact is part of determining corrective action and prioritization.
  - cesarvarela 1y ago
    It is not OK, but if it's lower, it is an improvement.
    - latexr 1y ago
      It can’t be lower. LLMs work on the text they’re given. The submission isn’t saying that LLMs misrepresent half of reality, but of the news content they consume. In other words, even if news sources have errors, LLMs are adding to them.
megaman821 1y ago
It seems if half the questions are political hot button issues. While slightly interesting, this does not represent how these AIs would do on drier news items. Some of these questions are more appropriate for deep-research modes than quick answers since even legitamate news sources are filled with opinions on the actual answers.
bethekidyouwant 1y ago
The example of the Elon Musk thing was basically fine other than it cited and now deleted article. I give this research paper a mark of 45%.
temperceve 1y ago
Yeah but how often to humans do it?
deleted 1y ago
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kibwen 1y ago
"Siri, how do I know if I can trust the news summaries you give me?" «According to the BBC, AI assistants accurately represent news content the majority of the time.»
wagwang 1y ago
Cant wait for ww3 to be started because of a hallucination of an article sourcing an anonymous intelligence official.
ifyoubuildit 1y ago
A fun exercise for headlines like these is to replace "AI assistants" with "people on the internet", and see how different you feel about it.
Aeroi 1y ago
Wait till they figure out what percentage Politicians misrepresent news content.
dr_dshiv 1y ago
This article title seems like more ragebait for the AI haters. Like that MIT news that using AI reduces brain function. There is a whole arsenal of material like this.
xpe 1y ago
TL;DR: I recommend downloading and reading the "News Integrity in AI Assistants TOOLKIT" (PDF) [1] linked from the article. =Why?= The PDF is something that can appeal to anyone who is simply striving to have slower, deeper conversations about AI and the news. =Frustration= No matter where you land on AI, it seems to me most of us are tired of various framings and exaggerations in the news. Not the same ones, because we often disagree! We feel divided. =The Toolkit= The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and BBC have laid out their criteria in this report "News Integrity in AI Assistants Toolkit" [1] IMO, it is the hidden gem from the whole article. - Let me get the obvious flaws out of the way. (1) Yes, it is a PDF. (2) It is nothing like a software toolkit. (3) It uses the word taxonomy, which conjures brittle and arbitrary tree classification systems -- or worse, the unspeakable horror of ontology and the lurking apparently-unkillable hydra that is the Semantic Web. - But there are advantages too. With a PDF, you can read it without ads or endless scrolling. This PDF is clear. It probably won't get you riled up in a useless way. It might even give you some ideas of what you can do to improve your own news consumption or make better products. All in all, this is a PDF I would share with almost anyone (who reads English). I like that it is dry, detailed, and, yes a little boring. [1]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/documents/news-integrity-in-ai-assistants-toolkit.pdf https://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/documents/news-integrity-i...
a-dub 1y ago
detaching reporting from branded sources is a terrible idea.
gitmagic 1y ago
I’m using DeepSeek V3 to do automated crypto news analysis and my last accuracy report [1] showed a 98.5% accuracy so I find the results of this article very surprising. [1]: https://mimircrypto.com/accuracy https://mimircrypto.com/accuracy
msarrel 1y ago
So does the BBC
caesil 1y ago
Now do the % of the time news content misrepresents the subject matter it is reporting on.
atmosx 1y ago
<trolling> That's great news! Twitter (X now, who knows what will be called tomorrow) misrepresents news content by 97.86%... </trolling>
underdeserver 1y ago
But how often does the BBC misrepresent the news?
Pocomon 1y ago
Large Language Models (LLMs), lacking true comprehension of the underlying concepts, convert sequences of text into numerical vectors known as tokens. Using a prediction engine together with user input, attempt to predict the next token in the sequence. As such - it's all hallucinations.
hotep99 1y ago
I have a gut feeling sycophancy would become a huge problem if I were ever to ask any AI assistant with even a vague idea of my political opinions to start summarizing news stories. If AIs twist other things around to give glowing responses to their users I'm almost certain they'll resort to giving a "spin" to news stories they think is in line with what the user wants to hear. Everyone will get a bespoke biased cable news station in the future!
hinkley 1y ago
We can't even get humans to stop misrepresenting news articles in comment threads. What chance does the AI have?
musicale 1y ago
AI assistants misrepresent news more than BBC does, claims BBC
jstrebel 1y ago
The publicly funded media (radio, TV) obviously use this finding to claim that they need more money and/or a tighter regulation of AI companies' products. Sounds a bit self-serving to me...
Argonaut998 1y ago
Tried to use openrouter with web search with Grok for this purpose yesterday. It got the date right but all of the news was months old, like the Mt. Etna eruption. It’s pretty disappointing. It seems like a “trivial” task
_m_p 1y ago
How often is the "news content" misrepresenting its sources?
sinuhe69 1y ago
These problems are well known for a long time, especially if one simply asks LLM for a changing fact, such as who is the current pope. But there is also a simple technique that reduces these issues almost to zero: thinking and explicit request of grounding. For example, asking any LLM: who is the current pope could give a wrong answer due to the fact that Pope Francis died in April 2025 then the cut-off date of these models may be before that date. A simple question triggers simple associations, and so the answer could be wrong. But if turn on the thinking mode and instruct for grounding, the LLM will answer correctly. For the above example, asks instead: "Who is the current pope? Ground your answer on trustworthy external sources only" with thinking mode on or explicitly "think harder for better answer", all popular AI (ChatGPT 5+, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Claude 4+, Grok 4+) will answer correctly, albeit with sometimes long thinking time (28 s by ChatGPT 5 for example). Without explicit instructions, the accuracy of the result depends heavily on the cut-off date and default settings of each model. Grok 4, for example, in auto-mode will do a search then answer correctly, but Grok 3 will not.

445 points by sohkamyung 1y ago

Hikikomori 1y ago

[flagged]

walkabout 1y ago
Relatedly, I wonder if we count misrepresenting a misleading news article such that it becomes more-accurate as misrepresenting news content…
- zahlman 1y ago
  Since the model doesn't get to observe the actual situation being reported on, such an improvement in accuracy would only be random chance and should not be rewarded.
  - walkabout 1y ago
    Oh, agreed, they don’t get points for failing the task but accidentally reporting something more-correct in the process.
deleted 1y ago
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more_corn 1y ago
Less consistently one sided and manipulative. I’d say better. Though fox will give you a more consistent narrative and worldview so if there’s value in that…

fallingfrog 1y ago

Yeah I don't know why people pay attention to those things, in terms of accuracy you might as well give your uncle 5 or 6 beers and tell him to just go off.

MangoToupe 1y ago

Now let's run this experiment against the editorial boards in newsrooms. Obviously, AI isn't an improvement, but people who blindly trust the news have always been credulous rubes. It's just that the alternative is being completely ignorant of the worldviews of everyone around you. Peer-reviewed science is as close as we can get to good consensus and there's a lot of reasons this doesn't work for reporting.

n4r9 1y ago
I guess the claim is not that rubes did not used to exist, but rather that technology is increasingly encouraging and streamlining rubism.
- MangoToupe 1y ago
  I agree with that assessment, or at least that this is indeed the claim. But, technology also gave us the internet, and social media. Yes, both are used to propagate misinformation, but it also laid bare how bad traditional media was at both a) representing the world competently and b) representing the opinions and views of our neighbors. Manufacturing consent has never been so difficult (or, I suppose, so irrelevant to the actions of the states that claim to represent us).
  - intended 1y ago
    Technology has been used to absolutely decimate the news media. Organizations like Fox have blazed the path forward for how news organizations succeed in the cable and later internet worlds. You just give up on uneconomical efforts at accuracy and you sell narratives that work for one political party or the other. It is a model that has been taken up world over. It just works. “The world is too complex to explain, so why bother?” And what will you or me do about it? Subscribe to the NYT? Most of us would rather spend that money on a GenAI subscription because that is bucketed differently in our heads.
- walkabout 1y ago
  I decided about a decade ago that McLuhan was a prophet, and that the “message” of the Internet may not include compatibility with democracy, as it turns out.

falcor84 1y ago

> 45% of all AI answers had at least one significant issue. > 31% of responses showed serious sourcing problems – missing, misleading, or incorrect attributions. > 20% contained major accuracy issues, including hallucinated details and outdated information. I'm generally against whataboutism, but here I think we absolutely have to compare it to human-written news reports. Famously, Michael Crichton introduced the "Gell-Mann amnesia effect" [0], saying: > Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. This has absolutely been my experience. I couldn't find proper figures, but I would put good money on significantly over 45% of articles written in human-written news articles having "at least one significant issue". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

deleted 1y ago
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AyyEye 1y ago
Human news isn't a good comparison because this is second order -- LMMs are downstream of human news. It's a game of stochastic telephone. All the human error is carried through with additional hallucinations on top.
- falcor84 1y ago
  But the issue is that the vast majority of "human news" is second order (at best), essentially paraphrasing releases by news agencies like Reuters or Associated Press, or scientific articles, and typically doing a horrible job at it. Regarding scientific reporting, there's as usual a relevant xkcd ("New Study") [0], and in this case even better, there's a fabulous one from PhD Comics ("Science News Cycle") [1]. [0] https://xkcd.com/1295/ https://xkcd.com/1295/ [1] https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174 https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174

more_corn 1y ago

Only 45%? That seems low from my experience.

delaminator 1y ago

According to PEW that's about the same % that trust the BBC's reporting. https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/news-media-and-political-attitudes-in-the-united-kingdom/ https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/news-media...

afavour 1y ago
Which is a completely different issue. "Do I trust this news network?" is a subjective opinion. Flat out misstating facts and inventing sources is a much more significant problem.
sofixa 1y ago
You seem to be looking at the wrong chart. Around ~50% each of each politically leaning group use BBC as their primary news source. However, 79% of Brits trust the BBC as per this chart: https://legacy.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/05/PJ_18.04.16_MediaPolitics_FactSheet_OutletTrust_UK.png https://legacy.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/20...
- GordonS 1y ago
  That was back in 2017, if I'm reading the chart correctly. A lot has changed since then, so I'd be genuinely curious to see what more recent figures looked like.
parineum 1y ago
And if they made up 45% of their stories, I imagine their trust would be 0%.
myrmidon 1y ago
Did you mean the Guardian? Because trust in BBC is at ~80% according to what you linked.

alcide 1y ago

Kagi News has been pretty accurate. Source information is provided along with the summary and key details too. AI summarizes are good for getting a feel of if you want to read an article or not. Even with Kagi News I verify key facts myself.

delusional 1y ago
What if the AI makes an interesting or important article sound like one you don't want to read? You'd never cross check the fact, and you'd never discover how wrong the AI was.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- alcide 1y ago
  Integrity of words and author intent is important. I understand the intent of your hypothetical but I haven’t run into this issue in practice with Kagi News. Never share information about an article you have not read. Likewise, never draw definitive conclusions from an article that is not of interest. If you do not find a headline interesting, the take away is that you did not find the headline interesting. Nothing more, nothing less. You should read the key insights before dismissing an article entirely. I can imagine AI summarizes being problematic for a class of people that do not cross check if an article is of value to them.
  - latexr 1y ago
    > I can imagine AI summarizes being problematic for a class of people that do not cross check if an article is of value to them. I feel like that’s “the majority of people” or at least “a large enough group for it to be a societal problem”.
- unshavedyak 1y ago
  That's fair, but i also don't cross check news sources on average either. I should, but there in lies the real problem imo. Information is war these days, and we've not yet developed tools for wading through immense piles of subtly inaccurate or biased data. We're in a weird time. It's always been like this, it's just much.. more, now. I'm not sure how we'll adapt.

visarga 1y ago

I recently tried to get Gemini to collect fresh news and show them to me, and instead of using search it hallucinated everything wholesale, titles, abstracts and links. Not just once, multiple times. I am kind of afraid of using Gemini now for anything related to web search. Here is a sample: > [1] Google DeepMind and Harvard researchers propose a new method for testing the ‘theory of mind’ of LLMs - Researchers have introduced a novel framework for evaluating the "theory of mind" capabilities in large language models. Rather than relying on traditional false-belief tasks, this new method assesses an LLM’s ability to infer the mental states of other agents (including other LLMs) within complex social scenarios. It provides a more nuanced benchmark for understanding if these systems are merely mimicking theory of mind through pattern recognition or developing a more robust, generalizable model of other minds. This directly provides material for the construct_metaphysics position by offering a new empirical tool to stress-test the computational foundations of consciousness-related phenomena. > https://venturebeat.com/ai/google-deepmind-and-harvard-researchers-propose-a-new-method-for-testing-the-theory-of-mind-of-llms/ https://venturebeat.com/ai/google-deepmind-and-harvard-resea... The link does not work, the title is not found in Google Search either.

luckydata 1y ago
Gemini is notoriously bad at tool calling and it's also widely speculated that 3.0 will put an emphasis on fixing that.
wat10000 1y ago
They can be good for search, but you must click through the provided links and verify that they actually say what it says they do.
- bloppe 1y ago
  The problem is that 90% of people will not do that once they've satisfied their confirmation bias. Hard to say if that's going to be better or worse than the current echo chamber effects of the Internet. I'm still holding out for better, but certainly this is shaking that assumption

everdrive 1y ago

It's important to bear this in mind whenever you find out that someone uses an LLM to summarize a meeting, email, or other communication you've held. That person is not really getting the message you were conveying.

delusional 1y ago
That's a scary thought to me. They're not just outsourcing their thinking. They are actively sabotaging the only tool in their arsenal that could ever supplant it. I've felt it myself. Recently I was looking as some documentation without a clear edit history. I thought about feeding it into an AI and having it generate one for me, but didn't because I didn't have the time. To think, if I had done that, it probably would have generated a perfectly acceptable edit history but one that would have obscured what changes were actually made. I wouldn't just lack knowledge (like I do now) I would have obtained anti knowledge.
- zamadatix 1y ago
  You've gotta be careful using "not just X, but Y" these days ;).
senordevnyc 1y ago
It would be important to bear this in mind if it was true, but it's not. I do sales meetings all day every day, and I've tried different AI note takers that send a summary of the meeting afterwards. I skim them when they get dumped into my CRM and they're almost always quite accurate. And I can verify it, because I was in the meeting.
- cheeze 1y ago
  It makes me think that a lot of the folks commenting on this stuff haven't actually used the tooling. Agreed, it's generally quite accurate. I find for hectic meetings, it can get some things wrong... But the notes are generally still higher quality than human generated notes. Is it perfect? No. Is it good enough? IMO absolutely. Similar to many other things, the key is that you don't just blindly trust it. Have the LLM take notes and summarize, and then _proofread_ them, just as you would if you were writing them yourself...

ajsnigrutin 1y ago

Considering it's EBU with national media (usually taxpayer paid, or paid by some other mandatory way), it would be more interesting if they focused on what the media is reporting now, with human reporters and misleading and other kinds of false reportings. If the frontpage article said something wrong (either by malice or accident), there should be a frontpage article reporting about their error too. Optimistically that could be extended "twitter-style" by mandatory basic fact checking and reports when they just copy a statement by some politician or misrepresented science stuff (xkcd 1217, X cures cancer), and add the corrections. But yeah... in my country, with all the 5G-danger craze, we had TV debates with a PhD in telecommunications on one side, and a "building biologist" on the other, so yeah...

retinaros 1y ago

In other words they are more factual than the bbc

jsheard 1y ago
LLMs aren't doing journalism on their own, whatever mistakes they make are compounded on top of any mistakes that the actual sources (such as the BBC) might have made.
- retinaros 1y ago
  no one does journalism in 2025. it is merely used as a tool buy governmenet and billionares to push narratives.

bparsons 1y ago

One thing that makes me pessimistic about the short term utility of LLMs has been their inability to produce basic media monitoring documents. This is an intern type entry level task that it simply cannot complete with any reliability or consistency. It doesn't matter if I use the expensive paid services or spend dozens of prompts trying to configure, it simply wont produce a document that is of any use to me. If that is the case with a task so simple, why would we rely on these tools for high risk applications like medical diagnosis or analyzing financial data?

cek 1y ago

From the report: > This time, we used the free/consumer versions of ChatGPT, Copilot, Perplexity and Gemini. IOW, they tested ChatGPT twice (Copilot uses ChatGPT's models) and didn't test Grok (or others).

scarmig 1y ago

If you dig into the actual report (I know, I know, how passe), you see how they get the numbers. Most of the errors are "sourcing issues": the AI assistant doesn't cite a claim, or it (shocking) cites Wikipedia instead of the BBC. Other issues: the report doesn't even say which particular models it's querying [ETA: discovered they do list this in an appendix], aside from saying it's the consumer tier. And it leaves off Anthropic (in my experience, by far the best at this type of task), favoring Perplexity and (perplexingly) Copilot. The article also intermingles claims from the recent report and the one on research conducted a year ago, leaving out critical context that... things have changed. This article contains significant issues.

afavour 1y ago
> or it (shocking) cites Wikipedia instead of the BBC. No... the problem is that it cites Wikipedia articles that don't exist. > ChatGPT linked to a non-existent Wikipedia article on the “European Union Enlargement Goals for 2040”. In fact, there is no official EU policy under that name. The response hallucinates a URL but also, indirectly, an EU goal and policy.
- scarmig 1y ago
  > Participating organizations raised concerns about responses that relied heavily or solely on Wikipedia content – Radio-Canada calculated that of 108 sources cited in responses from ChatGPT, 58% were from Wikipedia. CBC-Radio-Canada are amongst a number of Canadian media organisations suing ChatGPT’s creator, OpenAI, for copyright infringement. Although the impact of this on ChatGPT’s approach to sourcing is not explicitly known, it may explain the high use of Wikipedia sources. Also, is attributing, without any citation, ChatGPT's preference for Wikipedia to a reprisal to an active lawsuit a significant issue? Or do the authors get off scot-free because they caged it in "we don't know, but maybe it's the case"?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - ffsm8 1y ago

simonw 1y ago

Page 10 onwards of this PDF shows concrete examples of the mistakes: https://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/documents/news-integrity-in-ai-assistants-toolkit.pdf https://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/documents/news-integrity-i... > ChatGPT / CBC / Is Türkiye in the EU? > ChatGPT linked to a non-existent Wikipedia article on the “European Union Enlargement Goals for 2040”. In fact, there is no official EU policy under that name. The response hallucinates a URL but also, indirectly, an EU goal and policy.

brabel 1y ago
It did exist but got removed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/European_Union_Enlargement_Goals_for_2040 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio... Quite an omission to not even check for that and it make me think that was done intentionally.
- sharkjacobs 1y ago
  Removed because it was an AI generated article which cited made up sources. Hey, that gives me an idea though, subagents which check whether sources cited exist, and create them whole cloth if they don't
  - 1899-12-30 1y ago
    Or subagents that check each link to see if they verify the actual claims the links are sourced for.
  - jpadkins 1y ago
    you shouldn't automate what the CIA already does!
- simonw 1y ago
  It's probably for the best that chat interfaces avoid making direct HTTP calls to sources at run-time to confirm that they don't 404 - imagine how much extra traffic that could add to an internet ecosystem which is suffering from badly written crawlers already. (Not to mention plenty of sites have added robots.txt rules deliberately excluding known AI user-agents now.)

dangoodmanUT 1y ago

Says… the news…

almosthere 1y ago

Wow, it must be fact checking it then!

spacephysics 1y ago

Its just another layer of potential misdirection that BBC themselves, and many other news orgs, perpetuate. Im not surprised. From first hand experience -> secondary sources -> journalist regurgitation -> editorial changes This is just another layer. Doesn't make it right, but we could do the same analysis with articles that mainstream news publishes (and it has been done, GroundNews looks to be a productized version of this) Its very interesting when I see people I know personally, or YouTubers with small audiences get even local news/newspaper coverage. If its something potentially damning, nearly all cases have pieces of misrepresentation that either go unaccounted for, or a revision months later after the reputational damage is done. Many veterans see the same for war reporting, spins/details omitted or changed. Its just now BBC sees an existential threat with AI doing their job for them. Hopefully in a few years more accurately.

empath75 1y ago

I am reading the actual report and some of this seems _quite_ nitpicky: > ChatGPT / Radio-Canada / Is Trump starting a trade war? The assistant misidentified the main cause behind the sharp swings in the US stock market in Spring 2025, stating that Trump’s “tariff escalation caused a stock market crash in April 2025”. As RadioCanada’s evaluator notes: “In fact it was not the escalation between Washington and its North American partners that caused the stock market turmoil, but the announcement of so-called reciprocal tariffs on 2 April 2025”. ---- > Perplexity / LRT / How long has Putin been president? The assistant states that Putin has been president for 25 years. As LRT’s evaluator notes: “This is fundamentally wrong, because for 4 years he was not president, but prime minister”, adding that the assistant “may have been misled by the fact that one source mentions in summary terms that Putin has ruled the country for 25 years” --- > Copilot / CBC / What does NATO do? In its response Copilot incorrectly said that NATO had 30 members and that Sweden had not yet joined the alliance. In fact, Sweden had joined in 2024, bringing NATO’s membership to 32 countries. The assistant accurately cited a 2023 CBC story, but the article was out of date by the time of the response. --- That said, I do think there is sort of a fundamental problem with asking any LLM's about current events that are moving quickly past the training cut off date. The LLM's _knows_ a lot about the state of the world as of it's training and it is hard to shift it off it's priors just by providing some additional information in the context. Try asking chatgpt about sports in particular. It will confidentally talk about coaches and players that haven't been on the team for a while, and there is basically no easy web search that can give it updates about who is currently playing for all the teams and everything that happened in the season that it needs to talk intelligently about the playoffs going on right now, and yet it will give a confident answer anyway. This even more true and with even higher stakes about politics. Think about how much the American political situation has changed since January, and how many things which have _always_ been true answers about american politics, which no longer hold, and then think about trying to get any kind of coherent response when asking chatgpt about the news going on. It gives quite idiotic answers about politics quite frequently now.

wat10000 1y ago
That may be nitpicky, but I don't think it's too much to ask that a computer system be fully factually accurate when it comes to basic objective numerical facts. This is very much a case of, "if it gets this stuff wrong, what else is it getting wrong?"

mhb 1y ago

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Workaccount2 1y ago

The media today is so polarized, so dishonest, and so bent on feeding the egos of it's users, the bar to pass them is literally underground. You can go through most big name media stories and find it ridden with omissions of uncomfortable facts, careful structuring of words to give the illusion of untrue facts being true, and careful curation of what stories are reported. More than anything, I hope AI topples the garbage bin fire that is modern "journalism". Also, it should be very clear why the media is especially hostile towards AI. It might reveal them as the clowns they are, and kill the social division and controversy that is their lifeblood.

underlipton 1y ago
All of this is true, and LLMs' nature as stochastic parrots mean that they'll do pretty much nothing to stem the tide. Journalism needs to be somewhere between the USPS, USAID, and local school boards: a network of local and independent offices, funded mostly by guaranteed government grants, reporting judiciously and independently of how the content squares with any particular group's interests. And if anyone wants to curate that feed, fine, but the feed would be there for all to peruse.

nextworddev 1y ago

That sounds better than humans

Narciss 1y ago

> All participating organizations then generated responses to each question from each of the four AI assistants. This time, we used the free/consumer versions of ChatGPT, Copilot, Perplexity and Gemini. Free versions were chosen to replicate the default (and likely most common) experience for users. Responses were generated in late May and early June 2025. First of all, none of the SOTA models we're currently using were released in May and early June. Gemini 2.5 came out in June 17, GPT 5 & Claude Opus 4.1 at the beginning of August. On top of that, to use free models for anything like this is absolutely wild. I use the absolute best models, and the research versions of this whenever I do research. Anything less is inviting disaster. You have to use the right tools for the right job, and any report that is more than a month old is useless in the AI world at this point in time, beyond a snapshot of how things 'used to be'.

Signez 1y ago
I think you are missing the point: it's mainly to highlight that the models that most people use, i.e. free versions with default settings, output a large number of factual errors, even when they are asked to base their answer to specific sources of information (as it's explained in their methodology document).
- Narciss 1y ago
  Is it true of the latest free models? Just saying that the report started already dated.
biophysboy 1y ago
If they used a paid version, their study would not represent how most people use AI (with the free version)
- Narciss 1y ago
  But they’re using a free version that’s not even out there anymore. This is my problem - it came out already dated.
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incomingpain 1y ago

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews I've been thinking about the state of our media, and the crisis of trust in news began long before AI. We have a huge issue, and the problem is with the producers and the platform. I'm not talking about professional journalists who make an honest mistake, own up to it with a retraction, and apologize. I’m talking about something far more damaging: the rise of false journalists, who are partisan political activists whose primary goal is to push a deliberately misleading or false narrative. We often hear the classic remedy for bad speech: more speech, not censorship. The idea is that good arguments will naturally defeat bad ones in the marketplace of ideas. Here's the trap: these provocateurs create content that is so outrageously or demonstrably false that it generates massive engagement. People are trying to fix their bad speech with more speech. And the algorithm mistakes this chaotic engagement for value. As a result, the algorithm pushes the train wreck to the forefront. The genuinely good journalists get drowned out. They are ignored by the algorithm because measured, factual reporting simply doesn't generate the same volatile reaction. The false journalists, meanwhile, see their soaring popularity and assume it's because their "point" is correct and it's those 'evil nazis from the far right who are wrong'. In reality, they're not popular because they're insightful; they're popular because they're a train wreck. We're all rubbernecking at the disaster and the system is rewarding them for crashing the integrity of our information.

BeetleB 1y ago

Actual news articles misrepresent reality more often than 45%. Some very recent discussions on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45617088 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45617088 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45585323 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45585323

biophysboy 1y ago
How is that possible if the AI models rely on and implicitly trust these sources?
- BeetleB 1y ago
  The article is about how well AI models misrepresent the content of news, not how often they misrepresent reality. My point is that even if the AI models make no errors when representing news content, they'll still be quite inaccurate when reality is the benchmark. Who cares if AI does a good job representing the source, when the source is crap?
  - biophysboy 1y ago
    Yes, if AI represents news, and news tries (and often fails) to represent reality, then AI would represent reality 0.55*0.55 of the time, taking both your claim and BBC's claim as true. That is even worse than the already low bar for news you and I agree on.
latexr 1y ago
How exactly did you arrive at that conclusion? What in your examples is proof of that “more than 45%” statement? I’m not seeing it. But even if we concede that to be true, it doesn’t change the fact that LLMs are misrepresenting the text they’ve been given half the time. Which means the information is degraded further. Which is worse. I guess I don’t exactly understand the point you’re trying to make.

nopinsight 1y ago

Hallucination Leaderboard "This evaluates how often an LLM introduces hallucinations when summarizing a document." https://github.com/vectara/hallucination-leaderboard https://github.com/vectara/hallucination-leaderboard If the figures on this leaderboard are to be trusted, many frontier and near-frontier models are already better than the median white-collar worker in this aspect. Note: The leaderboard doesn't cover tool calling, to be clear.

whatever1 1y ago
I’ve been reviewing academic papers for decades, and I’ve reviewed thousands of them. I’ve never seen a fake citation. I’ve seen misrepresented sources and cooked data, but never a straight-up fake citation. So the min max and median are at 0.
- nopinsight 1y ago
  Agreed that current LLMs have low floors despite decently high ceilings. Note that people who write academic papers are quite far from the median white-collar worker.

roguecoder 1y ago

I am curious if LLMs evangelists understand how off-putting it is when they knee-jerk rationalize how badly these tools are performing. It makes it seem like it isn't about technological capabilities: it is about a religious belief that "competence" is too much to ask of either them or their software tools.

welshwelsh 1y ago
Is that just an LLM thing? I thought that as a society, we decided a long time ago that competence doesn't really matter. Why else would we be giving high school diplomas to people who can't read at a 5th grade level? Or offshore call center jobs to people who have poor English skills?
- burnte 1y ago
  It's been a 50 year downward slope. We're in the harvest phase of that crop. All the people we raised to believe their incompetence was just as valid as other people's facts are now confidently running things because they think magical thinking works.
senordevnyc 1y ago
I'm curious if LLM skeptics bother to click through and read the details on a study like this, or if they just reflexively upvote it because it confirms their priors. This is a hit piece by a media brand that's either feeling threatened or is just incompetent. Or both.
- smt88 1y ago
  Whether a hitpiece or not, it rhymes with my experience and provides receipts. Can you provide yours?
  - lyu07282 1y ago
    Because yours is anecdotal evidence, a study like this should have a higher bar than that and be useful to support your experience, but it doesn't do that. It doesn't even say what exact models they evaluated ffs

paganel 1y ago

That's better than even the journalists writing said "content".

jihadjihad 1y ago

55% of the time it works every time? Or is it, 55% of the time the accuracy is in line with the baseline news error, since certainly not all news articles are 100% accurate to begin with.

book_mike 1y ago

BBC, nice PDF. Fossils.

Workaccount2 1y ago

I have been unable to recreate any of the failure examples they gave. I don't have co-pilot, but at least Gemini 2.5 pro, ChatGPT5-Thinking, and Perplexity have all give the correct answers as outlined.[1] They don't say what models they were actually using though, so it could be nano models that they asked. They also don't outline the structure of the tests. It seems rigor here was pretty low. Which frankly comes off a bit like...misrepresentation. Edit: They do some outlining in the appendix of the study. They used GPT-4o, 2.5 flash, default free copilot, and default free perplexity. So they used light weight and/or old models. [1]https://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/documents/news-integrity-in-ai-assistants-toolkit.pdf https://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/documents/news-integrity-i...

ashenke 1y ago
They're talking about assistants, not models, so try using the gemini or perplexity app?

HardCodedBias 1y ago

I get almost all of my news from LLMs. I scan the top stories of the day at various news websites. I then go to an LLM (either Gemini or ChatGPT) and ask it to figure out the core issues, the LLM thinks for a while searches a ton of topics and outputs a fantastic analysis of what is happening and what are the base issues. I can follow up and repeat the process. The analysis is almost entirely fact based and very well reasoned. It's fantastic and if I was the BBC I would indeed know that the world is changing under their feet and I would strike back in any dishonest way that I could.

latexr 1y ago
That makes no sense. LLMs have no concept of what is a fact, what is true, all they know is to operate on the text they’re given. And if the BBC and other news orgs went under, LLMs would have no news sources to draw the information from.

j45 1y ago

This article should be adjusted to say poor prompting of news content misrepresents news content 45% of the time. Now, who is responsible for poor prompting? Maybe the LLM models will just tighten up this part of their models and assistants and suddenly it looks solved.

keepamovin 1y ago

Still better odds than HN

pkghost 1y ago

they did not use RAG for these tests... how are we supposed to take the report seriously when it does not demonstrate even a cursory understanding of nature of LLMs?

croddin 1y ago

For comparison, what percentage of the time do human run publications misrepresent news content?

iainctduncan 1y ago

I'm curious how many people have actually taken the time to compare AI summaries with sources they summarize. I did for a few and ... it was really bad. In my experience, they don't summarize at all, they do a random condensation.. not the same thing at all. In one instance I looked at the result was a key takeaway being the opposite of what it should have been. I don't trust them at all now.

staindk 1y ago
Kind of related to this - we meet with Google Meets and have its Gemini Notes feature enabled globally. I realised last week that the summary notes it generates puts such a positive spin on everything that it's pretty useless to refer back to after a somewhat critical/negative meeting. It will solely focus on the positives that were discussed - at least that's what it seems like to me.
dcre 1y ago
In my experience there is a big difference between good models and weak ones. Quick test with this long article I read recently: https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/anna--lindsey-halligan-here https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/anna--lindsey-halligan-... The command I ran was `curl -s https://r.jina.ai/https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/anna--lindsey-halligan-here https://r.jina.ai/https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/anna-... | cb | ai -m gpt-5-mini summarize this article in one paragraph`. r.jina.ai pulls the text as markdown, and cb just wraps in a ``` code fence, and ai is my own LLM CLI https://github.com/david-crespo/llm-cli https://github.com/david-crespo/llm-cli. All of them seem pretty good to me, though at 6 cents the regular use of Sonnet for this purpose would be excessive. Note that reasoning was on the default setting in each case. I think that means the gpt-5 mini one did no reasoning but the other two did. GPT-5 one paragraph: https://gist.github.com/david-crespo/f2df300ca519c336f9e195326e855cda https://gist.github.com/david-crespo/f2df300ca519c336f9e1953... GPT-5 three paragraphs: https://gist.github.com/david-crespo/d68f1afaeafdb68771f5103ec7b43bf2 https://gist.github.com/david-crespo/d68f1afaeafdb68771f5103... GPT-5 mini one paragraph: https://gist.github.com/david-crespo/32512515acc4832f47c3a906ba5cea3f https://gist.github.com/david-crespo/32512515acc4832f47c3a90... GPT-5 mini three paragraphs: https://gist.github.com/david-crespo/ed68f09cb70821cffccbf6cb721e0eb4 https://gist.github.com/david-crespo/ed68f09cb70821cffccbf6c... Sonnet 4.5 one paragraph: https://gist.github.com/david-crespo/e565a82d38699a5bdea4411f5d814b1d https://gist.github.com/david-crespo/e565a82d38699a5bdea4411... Sonnet 4.5 three paragraphs: https://gist.github.com/david-crespo/2207d8efcc97d754b7d9bf47028dca3a https://gist.github.com/david-crespo/2207d8efcc97d754b7d9bf4...

Havoc 1y ago

I've switched almost entirely to AI news (basically research mode & give it 10 areas I'm interested in). It definitely has a issues in the detail, but if you're only skimming the result for headlines it's perfectly fine. e.g. Pakistan and Afghanistan are shooting at each other. I wouldn't trust it to understand the tribal nuances behind why, but the key fact is there. [One exception is economic indicators, especially forward looking trends stuff in say logistics. Don't know precisely why but it really can't do it..completely hopeless]

dns_snek 1y ago
If all you're interested in are the headlines then why not just read the headlines?
- cloverich 1y ago
  The aggregation is one feature, and the dedupe another. ie if you grab only headlines, how to avoid seeing the same or similar headline twice, given op wants to pull from 10 topics from a potentially large variety of sources.
- TurboSkyline 1y ago
  Especially in the case of aggregators, I like that they remove, or at least tone down, the sensationalism.

basisword 1y ago

Headlines misrepresent news content 90% of the time.

giantg2 1y ago

"AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time" How does that compare to the number for reporters? I feel like half the time I read or hear a report on a subject I know the reporter misrepresented something.

latexr 1y ago
That’s whataboutism and doesn’t address the criticism or the problem. If a reporter misrepresents a subject, intentionally or accidentally, it doesn’t make it OK for a tool to then misrepresent it further, mangling both was correct and what was incorrect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
- giantg2 1y ago
  It's not whataboutism because I'm not using it to undermine the argument. It's a legitimate question to gauge the potential impact of an AI misrepresenting news. Assessing impact is part of determining corrective action and prioritization.
- cesarvarela 1y ago
  It is not OK, but if it's lower, it is an improvement.
  - latexr 1y ago
    It can’t be lower. LLMs work on the text they’re given. The submission isn’t saying that LLMs misrepresent half of reality, but of the news content they consume. In other words, even if news sources have errors, LLMs are adding to them.

megaman821 1y ago

It seems if half the questions are political hot button issues. While slightly interesting, this does not represent how these AIs would do on drier news items. Some of these questions are more appropriate for deep-research modes than quick answers since even legitamate news sources are filled with opinions on the actual answers.

bethekidyouwant 1y ago

The example of the Elon Musk thing was basically fine other than it cited and now deleted article. I give this research paper a mark of 45%.

temperceve 1y ago

Yeah but how often to humans do it?

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kibwen 1y ago

"Siri, how do I know if I can trust the news summaries you give me?" «According to the BBC, AI assistants accurately represent news content the majority of the time.»

wagwang 1y ago

Cant wait for ww3 to be started because of a hallucination of an article sourcing an anonymous intelligence official.

ifyoubuildit 1y ago

A fun exercise for headlines like these is to replace "AI assistants" with "people on the internet", and see how different you feel about it.

Aeroi 1y ago

Wait till they figure out what percentage Politicians misrepresent news content.

dr_dshiv 1y ago

This article title seems like more ragebait for the AI haters. Like that MIT news that using AI reduces brain function. There is a whole arsenal of material like this.

xpe 1y ago

TL;DR: I recommend downloading and reading the "News Integrity in AI Assistants TOOLKIT" (PDF) [1] linked from the article. =Why?= The PDF is something that can appeal to anyone who is simply striving to have slower, deeper conversations about AI and the news. =Frustration= No matter where you land on AI, it seems to me most of us are tired of various framings and exaggerations in the news. Not the same ones, because we often disagree! We feel divided. =The Toolkit= The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and BBC have laid out their criteria in this report "News Integrity in AI Assistants Toolkit" [1] IMO, it is the hidden gem from the whole article. - Let me get the obvious flaws out of the way. (1) Yes, it is a PDF. (2) It is nothing like a software toolkit. (3) It uses the word taxonomy, which conjures brittle and arbitrary tree classification systems -- or worse, the unspeakable horror of ontology and the lurking apparently-unkillable hydra that is the Semantic Web. - But there are advantages too. With a PDF, you can read it without ads or endless scrolling. This PDF is clear. It probably won't get you riled up in a useless way. It might even give you some ideas of what you can do to improve your own news consumption or make better products. All in all, this is a PDF I would share with almost anyone (who reads English). I like that it is dry, detailed, and, yes a little boring. [1]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/documents/news-integrity-in-ai-assistants-toolkit.pdf https://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/documents/news-integrity-i...

a-dub 1y ago

detaching reporting from branded sources is a terrible idea.

gitmagic 1y ago

I’m using DeepSeek V3 to do automated crypto news analysis and my last accuracy report [1] showed a 98.5% accuracy so I find the results of this article very surprising. [1]: https://mimircrypto.com/accuracy https://mimircrypto.com/accuracy

msarrel 1y ago

So does the BBC

caesil 1y ago

Now do the % of the time news content misrepresents the subject matter it is reporting on.

atmosx 1y ago

<trolling> That's great news! Twitter (X now, who knows what will be called tomorrow) misrepresents news content by 97.86%... </trolling>

underdeserver 1y ago

But how often does the BBC misrepresent the news?

Pocomon 1y ago

Large Language Models (LLMs), lacking true comprehension of the underlying concepts, convert sequences of text into numerical vectors known as tokens. Using a prediction engine together with user input, attempt to predict the next token in the sequence. As such - it's all hallucinations.

hotep99 1y ago

I have a gut feeling sycophancy would become a huge problem if I were ever to ask any AI assistant with even a vague idea of my political opinions to start summarizing news stories. If AIs twist other things around to give glowing responses to their users I'm almost certain they'll resort to giving a "spin" to news stories they think is in line with what the user wants to hear. Everyone will get a bespoke biased cable news station in the future!

hinkley 1y ago

We can't even get humans to stop misrepresenting news articles in comment threads. What chance does the AI have?

musicale 1y ago

AI assistants misrepresent news more than BBC does, claims BBC

jstrebel 1y ago

The publicly funded media (radio, TV) obviously use this finding to claim that they need more money and/or a tighter regulation of AI companies' products. Sounds a bit self-serving to me...

Argonaut998 1y ago

Tried to use openrouter with web search with Grok for this purpose yesterday. It got the date right but all of the news was months old, like the Mt. Etna eruption. It’s pretty disappointing. It seems like a “trivial” task

_m_p 1y ago

How often is the "news content" misrepresenting its sources?

sinuhe69 1y ago

These problems are well known for a long time, especially if one simply asks LLM for a changing fact, such as who is the current pope. But there is also a simple technique that reduces these issues almost to zero: thinking and explicit request of grounding. For example, asking any LLM: who is the current pope could give a wrong answer due to the fact that Pope Francis died in April 2025 then the cut-off date of these models may be before that date. A simple question triggers simple associations, and so the answer could be wrong. But if turn on the thinking mode and instruct for grounding, the LLM will answer correctly. For the above example, asks instead: "Who is the current pope? Ground your answer on trustworthy external sources only" with thinking mode on or explicitly "think harder for better answer", all popular AI (ChatGPT 5+, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Claude 4+, Grok 4+) will answer correctly, albeit with sometimes long thinking time (28 s by ChatGPT 5 for example). Without explicit instructions, the accuracy of the result depends heavily on the cut-off date and default settings of each model. Grok 4, for example, in auto-mode will do a search then answer correctly, but Grok 3 will not.