Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 306 posts

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

#141

Post by macintux »

janwl wrote: post #125
1980phipsi wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fix for this is for the AI to double-check all links before providing them to the user. I frequently ask ChatGPT to double check that references actually exist when it gives me them. It should be built in!

I thought people here hated it when LLMs made http requests?

I don't know for certain what you're referring to, but the "bulk downloads" of the Internet that AI companies are executing for training are the problem I've seen cited, and doesn't relate to LLMs checking their sources at query time.

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

#142

Post by gadders »

AndrewStephens wrote: post #137
gadders wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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.

Yes, that would be the Centrist Dad take.

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

#144

Post by smt88 »

senordevnyc wrote: post #110
roguecoder wrote: post #77

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.

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.

Whether a hitpiece or not, it rhymes with my experience and provides receipts. Can you provide yours?

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

#145

Post by CaptainOfCoit »

kenjackson wrote: post #51
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.

Actually there was a Wikipedia article of this name, but it was deleted in June -- because it was AI generated. Unfortunately AI falls for this much like humans do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...

> Actually there was a Wikipedia article of this name, but it was deleted in June -- because it was AI generated. Unfortunately AI falls for this much like humans do.

A recent Kurzgesagt goes into the dangers of this, and they found the same thing happening with a concrete example: They were researching a topic, tried using LLMs, found they weren't accurate enough and hallucinated, so they continued doing things the manual way. Then some weeks/months later, they noticed a bunch of YouTube videos that had the very hallucinations they were avoiding, and now their own AI assistants started to use those as sources. Paraphrased/remembered by me, could have some inconsistencies/hallucinations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zfN9wnPvU0

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

#146

Post by simonw »

brabel wrote: post #89
simonw wrote: post #39

Page 10 onwards of this PDF shows concrete examples of the mistakes: 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.

It did exist but got removed: 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.

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.)

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

#147

Post by kenjackson »

bunderbunder wrote: post #108
kenjackson wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually there was a Wikipedia article of this name, but it was deleted in June -- because it was AI generated. Unfortunately AI falls for this much like humans do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...

The biggest problem with that citation isn't that the article has since been deleted. The biggest problem is that that particular Wikipedia article was never a good source in the first place. That seems to be the real challenge with AI for this use case. It has no real critical thinking skills, so it's not really competent to choose reliable sources. So instead we're lowering the bar to just asking that the sources a…

I get what your saying. But you are now asking for a level of intelligence and critical thinking that I honestly believe is higher than the average person. I think its absolutely doable, but I also feel like we shouldn't make it sound like the current behavior is abhorrent or somehow indicative of a failure in the technology.

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

#148

Post by wat10000 »

reaperducer wrote: post #81
wat10000 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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. Then they're not very good at search. It's like saying the proverbial million monkeys at typewriters are good at search because eventually they type something right.

Huh? All the classic search engines required you to click through the results and read them. There's nothing wrong with that. What's different is that LLMs will give you a summary that might make you think you can get away with not clicking through anymore. This is a mistake. But that doesn't mean that the search itself is bad. I've had plenty of cases where an LLM gave me incorrect summaries of search results, and plenty of cases where it found stuff I had a hard time finding on my own because it was better at figuring out what to search for.

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

#149

Post by megaman821 »

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.

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

#150

Post by scellus »

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…

Are citation issues related to the fact that https://www.bbc.co.uk/robots.txt denies a lot of AI, both user agents and crawlers?
Post reply on HN