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AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time

bbc.co.uk

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Re: AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time

#131

Post by senderista »

jacobolus wrote: post #87
hnuser123456 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we have any good research on how much less often larger, newer models will just make stuff up like this? As it is, it's pretty clear LLMs are categorically not a good idea for directly querying for information in any non-fiction-writing context. If you're using an LLM to research something that needs to be accurate, the LLM needs to be doing a tool call to a web search and only asked to summarize relevant facts fr…

A further problem is that Wikipedia is chock full of nonsense, with a large proportion of articles that were never fact checked by an expert, and many that were written to promote various biased points of view, inadvertently uncritically repeat claims from slanted sources, or mischaracterize claims made in good sources. Many if not most articles have poor choice of emphasis of subtopics, omit important basic topics,…

Just the other day, I clicked through to a Wikipedia reference (a news article) and discovered that the citing sentence grossly misrepresented the source. Probably not accidental since it was about a politically charged subject.

Re: AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time

#132

Post by filoeleven »

empath75 wrote: post #120
wat10000 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?"

It is in fact too much to expect that an LLM get fine details correct because it is by design quite fuzzy and non-deterministic. It's like trying to paint the Mona Lisa with a paint roller. It's just a misuse of the tools to present LLM's summaries to people without a _lot_ of caveats about it's accuracy. I don't think they belong _anywhere_ near a legitimate news source. My primary point about calling out those mist…

What's the actual utility of a warning-stickered-to-death unreliable summary?

Re: AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time

#133

Post by gadders »

dontlaugh wrote: post #130
FooBarWidget wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't even say BBC is a good source to cite. For foreign news, BBC is outright biased. Though I don't have any good suggestions for what an LLM should cite instead.

The BBC has a strong right wing bias within the UK too. There’s no such thing as unbiased.

[flagged]

Re: AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time

#134

Post by staindk »

iainctduncan wrote: post #119

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.

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.

Re: AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time

#135

Post by marcosdumay »

FooBarWidget wrote: post #126
scarmig wrote: post #38

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 o…

I wouldn't even say BBC is a good source to cite. For foreign news, BBC is outright biased. Though I don't have any good suggestions for what an LLM should cite instead.

Well, if it's describing news content, it should cite the original news article.

Re: AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time

#136

Post by Havoc »

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]

Re: AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time

#137

Post by AndrewStephens »

gadders wrote: post #133
dontlaugh wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The BBC has a strong right wing bias within the UK too. There’s no such thing as unbiased.

[flagged]

I love how everyone seems to agree that the BBC is horribly biased but there is fierce debate as to whether it is run by the ghost of Joseph Goebbels or if the staff start each day singing The Red Flag.

Perhaps the real bias was inside us the whole time.

Re: AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time

#138

Post by sdoering »

542458 wrote: post #129
FooBarWidget wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't even say BBC is a good source to cite. For foreign news, BBC is outright biased. Though I don't have any good suggestions for what an LLM should cite instead.

Reuters or AP IMO. Both take NPOV and accuracy very seriously. Reuters famously wouldn't even refer to the 9/11 hijackers as terrorists, as they wanted to remain as value-neutral as possible.

In addition to that dpa from Germany for German news. Yes, dpa has had issues, but it is in my experience by far the source trying to be as non partisan as possible. Not necessarily when they sell their online feed business, though.

Disclaimer: Started my career in onine journalism/aggregation. Hada 4 week internship with the dpa online daughter some 16 years ago.

Re: AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time

#140

Post by terminalshort »

scarmig wrote: post #47
afavour wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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 exp…

It's a huge issue. No wonder AI hallucinates when it trains on this kind of crap.
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