BBC: Chatbots distort the facts about news

It’s already known that today’s generative AI (genAI) tools often have trouble with basic facts. Now, it’s clear they don’t well with current events either.

That’s the upshot of a test by the BBC, which asked ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini and Perplexity to answer 100 questions using BBC articles as a source; more than half of the answers (51%) were wrong.

One in five answers (19%) were based on directly incorrect facts — and 13% of quotes had been modified from the source.cFor example, the AI tools believe that Rishi Sunak is still the UK’s Prime Minister, and they gave the wrong death date for TV personality Michael Mosley.

“The price of AI’s extraordinary benefits must not be a world where people searching for answers are served distorted, faulty content that appears to be fact,” Deborah Turness, managing director of BBC News, wrote. “In what can feel like a chaotic world, it really can’t be right that consumers seeking clarity are met with yet more confusion.”