Tue, 11 Feb 2025

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 AI chatbots unable to accurately summarise news, BBC finds

The BBC's head of news and current affairs says the developers of the tools are "playing with fire."

* Four major AI chatbots - ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, and Perplexity - inaccurately summarized news stories in tests by the BBC.
* 51% of answers from the AI assistants had significant issues, with 19% including factual errors such as incorrect statements, numbers, or dates.
* The BBC's study found that these chatbots struggled to differentiate between opinion and fact, editorialized, and often failed to include essential context.
* The CEO of BBC News and Current Affairs, Deborah Turness, warned that AI companies are "playing with fire" and called for them to pull back their AI news summaries until they can ensure accuracy.
* OpenAI's spokesperson defended the company's chatbot, saying it helps users discover quality content through accurate summaries and attribution.
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