45% of AI News Research Has Major Issues
Real sources, wrong interpretations. Here's what you need to know.
I'm here to warn you about something that isn't being talked about.
AI is butchering research and spreading inaccurate info.
Not hallucinations.
I'm talking AI Search and well-regarded Deep Research tools totally changing narratives.
Results sound good and are sourced with legit citations.
They should be credible, right?
Wrong.
Here's what just came out:
The BBC and European Broadcasting Union tested chat models.
ChatGPT, Copilot, Perplexity, and Gemini.
Across 18 countries and 14 languages.
The result?
45% of AI-generated news answers had significant issues.
Factual errors. Misleading or missing sources. Opinions presented as fact. Wrong attribution.
It's harder to catch than blatant hallucinations.
They're more nuanced.
They look accurate at first glance.
And even sometimes when you check the source.
I see this constantly.
I write these newsletters and validate research for each piece.
AI gets it wrong a crazy amount of the time.
It pulls a study.
Cites it properly.
Then completely misinterprets what the study found.
The numbers could even be right, but the interpretation is trash.
And almost nobody's catching it.
We're blindly trusting Search and Deep Research tools because the crowd has deemed sourcing credible.
The risk?
It's not just looking dumb when someone fact-checks you.
It's worse:
Nobody fact-checks and you make decisions based on research that's wrong.
You trust it because it sounds authoritative.
Your team trusts it because you shared it.
Everyone moves forward on bad information.
And that information spreads even further.
What to do:
Don't stop using AI for research.
But stop blindly trusting it just because it has citations.
On the whole, it's still directionally good.
The issues come when you're digging into specifics.
Start fact-checking anything that's not a generalization.
Fact-check anything attributed to a singular source or that includes stats.
Find the original publication if it's a study.
Or click to sources you recognize if the original isn't available.
Control + F to locate the point or stat you're checking.
Read what the source actually says.
It's extra work.
But it's less work than fixing decisions made on bad information.
