The BBC and the European Broadcasting Union have produced a large study of how well AI chatbots handle summarising the news. In short: badly.
The researchers asked ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, and Perplexity about current events. 45% of the chatbot answers had at least one major issue. 31% were seriously wrong and 20% had major inaccuracies, from hallucinations or outdated sources. This is across multiple languages and multiple countries.
The AI distortions are “significant and systemic in nature.”
Well no shit. The whole point of most news is that it is already a summary. That’s why it’s not a livestream or novel, typically.
Summarizing a summary accurately is hard if the author was a halfway skilled writer. You have to omit facts, and then you fuck it all up.