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AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time

(www.bbc.co.uk)
421 points sohkamyung | 5 comments | 22 Oct 25 13:39 UTC | HN request time: 0.325s | source
1. BeetleB ◴[22 Oct 25 15:11 UTC] No.45670365[source]▶
Actual news articles misrepresent reality more often than 45%.

Some very recent discussions on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45617088

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45585323

replies(2): >>45670407 #>>45671989 #
2. biophysboy ◴[22 Oct 25 15:13 UTC] No.45670407[source]▶
How is that possible if the AI models rely on and implicitly trust these sources?
replies(1): >>45670461 #
3. BeetleB ◴[22 Oct 25 15:17 UTC] No.45670461[source]▶
The article is about how well AI models misrepresent the content of news, not how often they misrepresent reality. My point is that even if the AI models make no errors when representing news content, they'll still be quite inaccurate when reality is the benchmark.

Who cares if AI does a good job representing the source, when the source is crap?

replies(1): >>45671570 #
4. biophysboy ◴[22 Oct 25 16:27 UTC] No.45671570{3}[source]▶
Yes, if AI represents news, and news tries (and often fails) to represent reality, then AI would represent reality 0.55*0.55 of the time, taking both your claim and BBC's claim as true. That is even worse than the already low bar for news you and I agree on.
5. latexr ◴[22 Oct 25 16:58 UTC] No.45671989[source]▶
How exactly did you arrive at that conclusion? What in your examples is proof of that “more than 45%” statement? I’m not seeing it.

But even if we concede that to be true, it doesn’t change the fact that LLMs are misrepresenting the text they’ve been given half the time. Which means the information is degraded further. Which is worse.

I guess I don’t exactly understand the point you’re trying to make.