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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

#191

Post by coffeebeqn »

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 been looking at the Gemini call summaries and they almost always have at least one serious issue. Just yesterday Gemini claimed we had decided on something we had not. That was probably the most important detail and it got it completely backwards. Worse than useless

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

#192

Post by macintux »

shinycode wrote: post #152
smrq wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I share your opinion on the results, but why would you trust the LLM explanation for why it does what it does?

I don’t trust it at all. I wanted to know if he would be able to explain its own results. Just because it was displaying sources and links made me trust it until I checked and was horrified. I wanted to know if it was old link that broke or changed but no apparently

You said:

>...it finally told me that it generated « the most probable » urls for the topic in question based on the ones he knows exists.

smrq is asking why you would believe that explanation. The LLM doesn't necessarily know why it's doing what it's doing, so that could be another hallucination.

Your answer:

> ...I wanted to know if it was old link that broke or changed but no apparently

Leads me to believe that you misunderstood smrq's question.

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

#193

Post by latexr »

HardCodedBias wrote: post #97

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…

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.

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

#194

Post by empath75 »

filoeleven wrote: post #132
empath75 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Probably not much.

If you are a news organization and you want a reliable summary for an article, you should write it! You have writers available and should use them. This isn't a case where "better-than-nothing" applies, because "nothing" isn't your other option.

If you are an individual who wants a quick summary of something, then you don't have readers and writers on call to do that for you, and chatgpt takes a few seconds of your time and pennies to do a mediocre job.

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

#195

Post by ishtanbul »

gamerDude wrote: post #117
bunderbunder wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think this is a real challenge for everyone. In many ways potentially we need a restart of a wikipedia like site to document all the valid and good sources. This would also hopefully include things like source bias and whether it's a primary/secondary/tertiary source.

Maybe we can get AI to do this hard labor

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

#196

Post by dns_snek »

Havoc wrote: post #136

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…

If all you're interested in are the headlines then why not just read the headlines?

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

#197

Post by delusional »

unshavedyak wrote: post #64
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.

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.

> Information is war these days

I don't know If i can agree with that. I think we make an error when we aggregate news in the way we do. We claim that "the right wing media" says something when a single outlet associated with the right says a thing, and vice versa. That's not how I enjoy reading the news. I have a couple of newspapers I like reading, and I follow the arguments they make. I don't agree with what they say half the time, but I enjoy their perspective. I get a sense of the "editorial personality" of the paper. When we aggregate the news, we don't get that sense, because there's no editorial. I think that makes the news poorer, and I think it makes people's views of what newspapers can be poorer.

The news shouldn't a stream of happenings. The newspaper is best when it's a coherent day-to-day conversation. Like a pen-pal you don't respond to.

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

#198

Post by driverdan »

FooBarWidget wrote: post #162
542458 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's been a long time since 2001. Are they still value-neutral today on foreign news? It seems to me like they're heavily biased towards western POV nowadays.

Yes, Reuters has good, unbiased international coverage.

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

#199

Post by edavison1 »

ffsm8 wrote: post #90
scarmig wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Literally constantly? It takes both careful prompting and throughout double-checking to really notice however. Because often the links also exist, just don't represent what the LLM made it sound like. And the worst part about the people unironically thinking they can use it for "research" is, that it essentially supercharges confirmation bias. The inefficient sidequests you do while researching is generally what actu…

Ran into this the other day researching a brewery. Google AI summary referenced a glowing NYT profile of its beers. The linked article was not in fact about that brewery, but an entirely different one. Brewery I was researching has never been mentioned in the NYT. Complete invention at that point and has 'stolen' the good press from a different place and just fed the user what they wanted to see, namely a recommendation for the thing I was googling.
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