Kite News

This currently has an extremely serious hallucination (aka lying) problem, and I am begging people to not use AI-written "news" services. AI aggregation of links to real stories is maybe ok, but you cannot trust anything that claims to be "summarizing" sources while actually just making things up.

The first item I clicked on as a test was "Texas floods raise alarms over weather service cuts" in the Science section. Here are all the issues I found in about 2 minutes, again on the first and only item I've looked at:

- The first image is from the New York Times, but it links to an AP article that doesn't contain the image.

- "The Guadalupe surged more than 30 feet in five hours, overwhelming campsites and low-lying neighborhoods." These figures are wrong, all sources I can find say 30 feet at most, over a time period of much less than 5 hours.

- "A Trump-backed spending bill passed the House with a 22 % cut to NWS operations and satellite procurement." No idea what bill this is talking about or where this number came from, despite some effort to find out. Some sources say the local NWS had lost 22% of its staff, maybe the LLM saw this number somewhere and threw it in here for fun.

- "Kerr County’s applications for federal hazard-mitigation grants in 2017 and 2018 were rejected, leaving it without sirens or modern river gauges." This is very misleading wording, the grant applications were denied by Texas, not by the federal government.

- "“We know the river rises, but we can’t warn people with equipment we don’t have.” - Judge Rob Kelly, Kerr County" This is a hallucinated quote attributed to a real person. He never said the "we can’t warn people with equipment we don’t have" part, nor did anyone else. This is an incredibly serious issue and it is deeply irresponsible to release a product that does this.

- The second image is a graphic that says Disaster 101. It is from a link inside a Grist article about the floods for another article about general disaster preparedness. However, Kagi links it to a Reddit post about Ted Cruz. Kagi's caption is "Trees partially submerged along the swollen Guadalupe River on July 4, 2025.". This is lightly paraphrased from the caption of a completely different image in the Grist article.

- The Perspectives section cites three real articles, but hallucinates their content including quotes that don't exist in the articles. I won't quote them fully here because this post is already pretty long.

- "At least 110 people are confirmed dead and 161 remain missing; survivors urgently need clean water, temporary shelter and mental-health support as temperatures climb above 100 °F." Are temperatures above 100? I don't think this is true.

- "Doppler radar gap: Hill Country sits at the edge of overlapping radar beams, making river-level gauges crucial for flash-flood warnings." This is completely made up as far as I can tell.

- "Lead-time metric: NWS aims for 15-minute flash-flood warning lead-times; staff fear this could shrink if vacancies and equipment gaps grow." Could not confirm this, and 15 minutes seems like an absurdly short goal. I can't believe this is true.

- "A recent AP-NORC poll found that 76 % of Americans trusted National Weather Service forecasts before the Texas disaster, one of the highest confidence levels for any federal agency." This is a lie, the poll didn't even ask a question about trust in forecasts.

This is just the surface-level issues that are easy to spot, I did not get into more technical claims that would take domain knowledge to fact check, and I did not mention overall "editorial" decisions about what was and was not included in the story, which were also very bad.

I have been a Kagi customer for a long time and I like the search engine, but I will probably cancel my subscription if you don't take this down. I can't have my money funding a literal fake news engine.

> News never changed. It was always exactly like this.

That's not true. Bias and agenda have always existed, but there was a time when news sources clearly distinguished facts from opinions. In the US the shift arguably happened in 1987 when the fairness doctrine was abolished, and for-profit media companies were given freedom to publish anything they wanted. The 24/7 news cycle was established, and news sources operated under incentives to keep consumers' attention above everything else, including journalistic integrity.

> The thing that changed is social media is letting everyone fact check the journalists and we're catching them in their lies. We are ushering in a new era of professionalism and truth in journalism and it's not going well at all.

That's a bold take, if I ever saw one. You're actually saying that social media is a good thing for journalism?

If anything, social media exacerbated the free-for-all problem of reporting. Suddenly, everyone was a news reporter, with zero moral or integrity obligations. On the contrary: the larger the audience of a social media influencer, the more incentivized they are to infuse their content with bias and agenda. Companies, advertisers, and governments love that influencers can be easily bought. This is far from a "new era of professionalism and truth in journalism". What a skewed perspective you have.

And now with AI tools, the world is even more flooded with (m|d)isinformation than ever before.

There's nothing inherently flawed about traditional news media. It just needs to be strongly regulated to report facts rather than opinions[1]. This regulation is literally impossible on social media. Journalism is not something anyone with a social media account can or should do. I'm not saying that journalism can't exist on social media—it certainly can. But on its own it's not a place where journalism can thrive.

I would go a step further and make journalism a licensed profession, with its own variant of the Hippocratic Oath. Making the line between fact and fiction as clear as possible is essential to living in reality. Otherwise, words can be weaponized and people can be manipulated into thinking and acting in ways that are beneficial to those in power.

[1] To counter the argument "who gets to be the arbitrer of truth?", it's quite easy to determine when a news story is opinionated: it's loaded with adjectives and language that is crafted to elicit an emotional response in the consumer. Journalism, on the other hand, reports events that happened. It succinctly answers who, what, when, where. It doesn't describe why, or tries to put a spin on the facts. Those events can be easily fact checked. In fact, if everyone was doing journalism, every news story would be exactly the same. The differences are the bulk of the bias and agenda.

Don't worry, the first link I clicked, by chance, was this super well-balanced article: https://www.dailysignal.com/2025/07/09/big-beautiful-test-of...

/s

> As always, Democrats tried to demonize spending reductions as attacks on the poor, though any voter who looks at what the bill actually says will find commonsense reforms

> the BBB helps families tremendously

> Democrats have spent a decade praying Trump would shatter the Republican coalition, but instead he’s strengthened it, clarifying the party’s aims and defying the fringes.

> He listens to libertarians and family-policy engineers, but he wouldn’t allow narrow concerns to veto a bill that protects the border and lowers taxes for essentially everyone.

Glad I got a perfectly well-balanced look at the pros and cons of this piece of legislation.

Kagi News (formerly Kite) Product Manager here,

You can use the website and even make it a web app if you want. We’ll be releasing a mobile version that will be better suited but will have the same features :)