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'AI Assistants' Are Actually Less Reliable For News
According to a study by the European Broadcasting Union on artificial intelligence, AI assistants such as ChatGPT made errors around half the time when users asked for information about news and current affairs.
Overall, 45 percent of all AI answers had "at least one significant issue", regardless of language or country of origin, the report said.
Common mistakes included confusing real news with parody, getting dates wrong or simply inventing events.
Sourcing – missing, misleading, or incorrect attributions – was the biggest cause of problems, at 31 percent, the report found. This was followed by accuracy, which caused 20 percent of the problems, and providing sufficient context, at 14 percent.
(Via rfi.)
This same idea was explored early on in science fiction decades ago. In his 1978 novel The Fountains of Paradise. Arthur C. Clarke described the personal interest profile that could be used to gather all relevant items of information from news feeds.
Most men updated their PIP on New Year's Day, or their birthday. Morgan's list contained fifty items; he had heard of people with hundreds. They must spend all their waking hours battling with the flood of information
See also the personalized news from Ralph 124c 41 + (1911), by Hugo Gernsback, which had the idea of a newspaper printed based on general subscriber interests.
The five criteria used to evaluate the responses were accuracy, sourcing, distinguishing opinion from fact, editorialisation and context.
But the same technology that had eliminated one set of tasks had created even more demanding successors. Of these, perhaps the most important was the design of the Personal Interest Profile.
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