BBC: “New research coordinated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and led by the BBC has found that AI assistants – already a daily information gateway for millions of people – routinely misrepresent news content no matter which language, territory, or AI platform is tested. The intensive international study of unprecedented scope and scale was launched at the EBU News Assembly, in Naples. Involving 22 public service media (PSM) organizations in 18 countries working in 14 languages, it identified multiple systemic issues across four leading AI tools.
Professional journalists from participating PSM evaluated more than 3,000 responses from ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, and Perplexity against key criteria, including accuracy, sourcing, distinguishing opinion from fact, and providing context.
Key findings:
- 45% of all AI answers had at least one significant issue.
- 31% of responses showed serious sourcing problems – missing, misleading, or incorrect attributions.
- 20% contained major accuracy issues, including hallucinated details and outdated information.
- Gemini performed worst with significant issues in 76% of responses, more than double the other assistants, largely due to its poor sourcing performance.
- Comparison between the BBC’s results earlier this year and this study show some improvements but still high levels of errors.
Why this distortion matters – AI assistants are already replacing search engines for many users. According to the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2025, 7% of total online news consumers use AI assistants to get their news, rising to 15% of under-25s. ‘This research conclusively shows that these failings are not isolated incidents,’ says EBU Media Director and Deputy Director General Jean Philip De Tender. ‘They are systemic, cross-border, and multilingual, and we believe this endangers public trust. When people don’t know what to trust, they end up trusting nothing at all, and that can deter democratic participation.’ Peter Archer, BBC Programme Director, Generative AI, says: ‘We’re excited about AI and how it can help us bring even more value to audiences. But people must be able to trust what they read, watch and see. Despite some improvements, it’s clear that there are still significant issues with these assistants. We want these tools to succeed and are open to working with AI companies to deliver for audiences and wider society.’..”
See also The Atlantic – A Tool That Crushes Creativity. AI slop is winning. “…Booksellers have spent the past two years battling a deluge of both AI slop rip-off books and chatbot-generated book reviews on retail sites such as Amazon. There is “code slop.” In corporate life, “workslop” abounds in the form of bad emails, slide decks, and lifeless memos; teachers everywhere are drowning in academic slop, to such an extent that some are rewriting their curricula. There’s slop in your Spotify playlists and on TikTok and probably in your group chats. Some of YouTube’s most-subscribed-to channels are full of automated slop. Craft brewers appear to be putting slop-rendered images on their beer cans. There is no realm of life that is unsloppable. Synthetic content is not exactly new, but lately it has become a load-bearing part of the internet. For instance, the SEO company Graphite recently found that, beginning around November 2024, the internet experienced a slop tipping point, in which the quantity of AI-generated articles being published on the web surpassed the quantity of articles written by humans…”
