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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

#171

Post by zahlman »

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,…

> 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.

Yep.

Including, if not especially, the ones actively worked on by the most active contributors.

The process for vetting sources (both in terms of suitability for a particular article, and general "reliable sources" status) is also seriously problematic. Especially when it comes to any topic which fundamentally relates to the reliability of journalism and the media in general.

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

#173

Post by rsynnott »

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.

This isn't a new issue; Saturday Night Fry (the predecessor to a Bit of Fry and Laurie) was making fun of it in the 1980s. The BBC's commitment to 'balance' has always lead it in rather weird directions.

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

#174

Post by kibwen »

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.

We live in a post-truth society. This means that, unfortunately, most of society has learned that it doesn't matter if what you're saying is true. All that matters is that the words that you speak cause you or your cause to gain power.

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

#175

Post by latexr »

brabel wrote: post #98
alcide wrote: post #12

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.

How do you verify a fact? Do you travel to the location and interview the locals? Or read scientific papers in various fields, including their own references, to validate summaries published by news sources? At some point you need to just trust that someone is telling the truth.

I’m pretty sure what the what your parent comment means is they verify that key facts outputted by the summary match what’s written in the source.

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

#176

Post by zahlman »

walkabout wrote: post #7
Hikikomori wrote: post #2

[flagged]

Relatedly, I wonder if we count misrepresenting a misleading news article such that it becomes more-accurate as misrepresenting news content…

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.

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

#177

Post by n4r9 »

vidarh wrote: post #168
n4r9 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is the ease with which AI can be rolled out, scaled up, and woven into the fabric of our interactions with society.

That makes understanding the baseline all the more important. It could be a disaster, or it could in fact be a distinct improvement. Every time someone pushes a breathless headline about failure rates of AI without comparing it to a human baseline, they are in essence potentially misleading us because without that baseline we don't know whether it's better or worse.

I disagree. Comparison with human baseline is basically irrelevant. AI will be used in so many more ways and at so much greater scale that the failure rate has to stand alone as extraordinarily low regardless of human abilities.

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

#178

Post by latexr »

alcide wrote: post #56
delusional wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 m…

> 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”.

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

#179

Post by icelancer »

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.

I've found this mostly to be the case when using lightweight open source models or mini models.

Rarely is this an issue with SOTA models like Sonnet-4.5, Opus-4.1, GPT-5-Thinking or better, etc. But that's expensive, so all the companies use cut-rate models or non-existent TTC to save on cost and to go faster.

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

#180

Post by latexr »

giantg2 wrote: post #143

"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.

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

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