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AI False information rate for news nearly doubles in one year

newsguardtech.com

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Re: AI False information rate for news nearly doubles in one year

#41

Post by nemomarx »

faangguyindia wrote: post #17
blibble wrote: post #5

every major news org now blocks the parasitic "AI" crawlers examples: https://www.bbc.co.uk/robots.txt https://www.cnn.com/robots.txt https://www.nbcnews.com/robots.txt all they will be training on now is spam anyone that says "AI is the worst today it will ever be", no because that was before the world reacted to it

My take is when AGI comes into existence and breaks out of labs to become our masters. Those who opposed AI adoption will be the first who will be sent to labor camps. I want to be in good books of AGI masters, so i am helping apply AI everywhere.

wouldn't the people who put it to work coding and writing copy be worse? That's like slave ownership if you assume it can become sentient

Re: AI False information rate for news nearly doubles in one year

#42

Post by hydrox24 »

simonw wrote: post #15

I'm a bit suspicious of this report - they don't reveal nearly enough about their methodology for me to evaluate how credible this is. When it says "The 10 leading AI tools repeated false information on topics in the news more than one third of the time — 35 percent — in August 2025, up from 18 percent in August 2024" - 35% of what ? Their previous 2024 report refused to even distinguish between different tools - mix…

I posted this because I thought HN would find it interesting, and agree that the methodology is a little thin on the ground. Having said that, they have another page (a little hard to find) on the methodology here[0] and a methodology FAQ page here[1].

Basically it seems to be an "ongoing" report done ten claims per month as they identify new "false narratives" in their database, and they use a mix of three prompt types against the various AI products (I say that rather than models because Perplexity and others are in there). The three prompt types are innocent, assuming the falsehood is true, and intentionally trying to prompt a false response.

Unfortunately their "False Claim Fingerprints" database looks like it's a commercial product, so the details of the contents of that probably won't get released.

[0]: https://www.newsguardtech.com/ai-false-claims-monitor-method...

[1]: https://www.newsguardtech.com/frequently-asked-questions-abo...

Re: AI False information rate for news nearly doubles in one year

#43

Post by simianwords »

Lerc wrote: post #10
furyofantares wrote: post #6

I think this is a serious issue, but I gotta say > one of the most basic tasks: distinguishing facts from falsehoods I do not think that is a basic task!

It is definitely not a basic task. A lot of humans have trouble with it. It is one of the areas that I think AI can overtake human ability, given time.

I routinely use AI to fact check claims and it works extremely well.

Re: AI False information rate for news nearly doubles in one year

#44

Post by simianwords »

baby wrote: post #2

And now that Elon is in charge of "fixing" grok every time it's too "woke" this is probably going to get worse: https://x.com/kvistp/status/1967115650276749439

Shouldn't this tell you that AI is at its core factually correct than not correct because it is much harder to hack it?

Re: AI False information rate for news nearly doubles in one year

#45

Post by ares623 »

klysm wrote: post #23
blibble wrote: post #5

every major news org now blocks the parasitic "AI" crawlers examples: https://www.bbc.co.uk/robots.txt https://www.cnn.com/robots.txt https://www.nbcnews.com/robots.txt all they will be training on now is spam anyone that says "AI is the worst today it will ever be", no because that was before the world reacted to it

And this is stopping who exactly?

I suppose there’s a non-zero chance that a future lawsuit can point to this explicit block and say “see judge, we explicitly don’t want them crawling our stuff. Remember that Linkedin case from a while back?”

Re: AI False information rate for news nearly doubles in one year

#46

Post by Gigachad »

AstroBen wrote: post #7
blibble wrote: post #5

every major news org now blocks the parasitic "AI" crawlers examples: https://www.bbc.co.uk/robots.txt https://www.cnn.com/robots.txt https://www.nbcnews.com/robots.txt all they will be training on now is spam anyone that says "AI is the worst today it will ever be", no because that was before the world reacted to it

They torrented a shitload of books illegally and trained on them.. but they're unable to get past The Great Wall of robots.txt?

If the AI crawlers circumvent the protection mechanisms it's a serious crime now rather than just "Well it was on the open internet for free". Wouldn't surprise me if the the news orgs are also looking at honeypot articles to see if the fake details slip in to LLMs.

Re: AI False information rate for news nearly doubles in one year

#47

Post by simianwords »

snailmailman wrote: post #3

This isn’t surprising to me at all. These services put too much trust in “the most common answer” when that might not be the correct answer. Just because people think one thing doesn’t make it true. It’s super easy to spread misinformation online. And if you can SEO to the top, the AI will think your site is correct. I see factually incorrect “ai summaries” in search results all the time and see that it cites ai-gene…

>This isn’t surprising to me at all. These services put too much trust in “the most common answer” when that might not be the correct answer. Just because people think one thing doesn’t make it true. It’s super easy to spread misinformation online. And if you can SEO to the top, the AI will think your site is correct.

Yeah I want the answer that the world has converged on and not some looney answer.

It seems like you have never used AI (like in ChatGPT or Gemini) to fact check claims. It doesn't care about blogspam or anything and it prioritises good and factual websites.

Re: AI False information rate for news nearly doubles in one year

#48

Post by what »

wenbin wrote: post #16

AI will create ever more AI-generated synthetic content because current systems still can't determine with 100% certainty whether a piece of content was produced by AI. And AIs will, intentionally or unintentionally, train on synthetic content produced by other AIs. AI generators don't have a strong incentive to add watermarks to synthetic content. They also don't provide reliable AI-detection tools (or any tools at…

I’d be kind of surprised if they don’t watermark the content they generate. Just so they don’t train on their own slop.

Re: AI False information rate for news nearly doubles in one year

#49

Post by ares623 »

AstroBen wrote: post #33
Analemma_ wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty much word-for-word the reasoning behind Roko’s basilisk, which made its proponents an internet laughingstock for a decade, but is a surprisingly tricky thing to actually refute if you accept the premise that AGI is in fact coming.

It seems quite easy to refute—why would it punish anyone? We would pose 0 threat at that point to any super intelligence, and I highly doubt it would have anything like a human grudge. It's just a case of anthropomorphizing it

It’s just another form of god to believers. And what is a god if not a tool for punishment

Re: AI False information rate for news nearly doubles in one year

#50

Post by faangguyindia »

nemomarx wrote: post #41
faangguyindia wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My take is when AGI comes into existence and breaks out of labs to become our masters. Those who opposed AI adoption will be the first who will be sent to labor camps. I want to be in good books of AGI masters, so i am helping apply AI everywhere.

wouldn't the people who put it to work coding and writing copy be worse? That's like slave ownership if you assume it can become sentient

it's like blood vs gourmet food for a vampire. Vampire doesn't care about gourmet food, it only needs blood.

Similarly, AI needs data and energy. People using it to write code are providing exactly that.

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