AI Assistants Misrepresent News Content 45% of the Time

You just give up on uneconomical efforts at accuracy and you sell narratives that work for one political party or the other.

It is a model that has been taken up world over. It just works. “The world is too complex to explain, so why bother?”

And what will you or me do about it? Subscribe to the NYT? Most of us would rather spend that money on a GenAI subscription because that is bucketed differently in our heads.

Not a personal one. You do however have reporters sitting between you and the source material a lot of the time, and sometimes multiple levels of reporters playing games of telephone with the source material.

> The comparison is between a human reading the primary source against the same human reading an LLM hallucination mixed with an LLM referring the primary source.

In modern news reporting, a fairly substantial proportion of what we digest is not primary sources. It's not at all clear whether an LLM summarising primary sources would be better or worse than reading a reporter passing on primary sources. And in fact, in many cases the news is not even secondary sources - e.g. a wire service report on primary sources getting rewritten by a reporter is not uncommon.

> The fact that you mark as cynical a question answered pretty reliably for most countries sort of tanks the point.

It's a cynical point within the context of this article to point out that it is meaningless to report on the accuracy of AI in isolation because it's not clear that human reporting is better for us. I find it kinda funny that you dismiss this here, after having downplayed the games of telephone that news reporting often is earlier in your reply, thereby making it quite clear I am in fact being a lot more cynical than you about it.

Is this not the editorial board and journalist? I'm not sure what the gripe is here.

I feel like that’s “the majority of people” or at least “a large enough group for it to be a societal problem”.

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.

Do you have an in-depth understanding of how those "agentic powers" are implemented? If not, you should probably research it yourself. Understanding what's underneath the buzzwords will save you some disappointment in the future.

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 actually gives you the ability to really reason about a topic.

If you instead just laser focus on the tidbits you prompted with... Well, your opinion is a lot less grounded.

I have seen a few cases before of "hallucinations" that turned out to be things that did exist, but no longer do.

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 actually exist. I really hate that. We shouldn't be lowering intellectual standards to meet AI where it's at. These intellectual standards are important and hard-won, and we need to be demanding that AI be the one to rise to meet them.

A recent Kurzgesagt goes into the dangers of this, and they found the same thing happening with a concrete example: They were researching a topic, tried using LLMs, found they weren't accurate enough and hallucinated, so they continued doing things the manual way. Then some weeks/months later, they noticed a bunch of YouTube videos that had the very hallucinations they were avoiding, and now their own AI assistants started to use those as sources. Paraphrased/remembered by me, could have some inconsistencies/hallucinations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zfN9wnPvU0

A critical human reader can go as deep as they like in examining claims there: can look at the source listed for a claim, can often click through to read the claim in the source, can examine the talk page and article history, can search through the research literature trying to figure out where the claim came from or how it mutated in passing from source to source, etc. But an AI "reader" is a predictive statistical model, not a critical consumer of information.

Not to mention, the AI companies have been extremely abusive to the rest of the internet so they are often blocked from accessing various web sites, so it's not like they're going to be able to access legitimate information anyways.

One way to successfully use LLMs is to do the initial research legwork. Run the 40 Google searches and follow links. Evaluate sources according to some criteria. Summarize. And then give the human a list of links to follow.

You quickly learn to see patterns. Sonnet will happily give a genuinely useful rule of thumb, phrasing it like it's widely accepted. But the source will turn out to be "one guy on a forum."

There are other tricks that work well. Have the LLM write an initial overview with sources. Tell it strictly limit itself to information in the sources, etc. Then hand the report off to a fresh LLM and tell it to carefully check each citation in the report, removing unsourced information. Then have the human review the output, following links.

None of this will get you guaranteed truth. But if you know what you're doing, it can often give you a better starting point than Wikipedia or anything on the first two pages of Google Search results. Accurate information is genuinely hard to get, and it always has been.

Still not enough as I find the LLM will not summarize all the relevant facts, sometimes leaving out the most salient ones. Maybe you'll get a summary of some facts, maybe the ones you explicitly ask for, but you'll be left wondering if the LLM is leaving out important information.

Disclaimer: Started my career in onine journalism/aggregation. Hada 4 week internship with the dpa online daughter some 16 years ago.