Obviously, AI isn't an improvement, but people who blindly trust the news have always been credulous rubes. It's just that the alternative is being completely ignorant of the worldviews of everyone around you.
Peer-reviewed science is as close as we can get to good consensus and there's a lot of reasons this doesn't work for reporting.
Or against people in general.
It's a pet peeve of mine that we get these kinds of articles without a baseline established of how people do on the same measure.
Is misrepresenting news content 45% of the time better or worse than the average person? I don't know.
By extension: Would a person using an AI assistant misrepresent news more or less after having read a summary of the news provided by an AI assistant? I don't know that either.
When they have a "Why this distortion matters" section, those things matter. They've not established if this will make things better or worse.
(the cynic in me want another question answered too: How often does reporters misrepresent the news? Would it be better or worse if AI reviewed the facts and presented them vs. letting reporters do it? again: no idea)