detaching reporting from branded sources is a terrible idea.
AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time
211–220 of 306 posts
Re: AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
The report says that different media organizations dropped their robots.txt for the duration of the research to give LLMs access. I would expect this isn't the on-off switch they conceptualized, but I don't know enough about how different LLM providers handle news search and retrieval to say for sure.
Does it work like that though? How long does it take for AI bots to crawl sites and have the data added to the model currently being used? Am I wrong in thinking that it takes a lot longer for AI bot crawls to be available to the public than a typical search engine crawler?
Re: AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time
#213Earlier 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...
AI-powered citogenesis!
Re: AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time
#214I'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.
Random condensation is a great way to put it. This is exactly what I see particularly in email and text summaries, they do not capture the gist of the message but instead just pull out random phrases that 99.9% of the time are not the gist at all. I have learned to completely ignore them.
Re: AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time
#215If 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…
This article is doing precisely what it is supposed to do, though. It is giving a headline for people to cite later.
Expect to see links to it, or even just vague references similar to the whole "95% of AI projects fail" misinformation in a month or two.
POSIWID
Re: AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time
#216I’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.
Re: AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time
#217If 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…
Human journalists misrepresent the white paper 85% of the time. With this in mind, 45% doesn't seem so bad anymore
You stole my reply haha! However, I was gonna say journalists misrepresent papers and other content 95% of the time...
Re: AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time
#218I'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
I used to be a bit nervous about Gemini recording every call. Sometimes when there was a major disagreement I would review the summaries to make sure I didn't say anything I shouldn't have only to find an arbitrary, unrelated bullet point attributed to me. I quickly realized there was nothing to worry about.
Similarly I've had PMs blindly copy/paste summaries into larger project notes and ultimately create tickets based on either a misunderstanding from the LLM or a straight-up hallucination. I've repeatedly had conversations where a PM asks "when do you think Xyz will be finished?" only for me to have to ask in response "where and when did we even discuss Xyz? I'm not even sure what Xyz means in this context, so clarification would help." Only to have them just decide to delete the ticket/bullet etc. once they realize they never bothered to sanity check what they were pasting.
Re: AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time
#219I'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'm rarely not at least a little underwhelmed when I source check or read an answer with focus on details. More often than not answers are technically wrong but correct enough to lead me into the right direction.
Re: AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time
#220Kagi 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.
Kagi News is basically a summary of news articles fed into the context. It's different from what the op is about, that is just asking an LLM with web access to query the news.