AI gets 45% of news wrong — but readers still trust it

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answers had at least one major issue. 31% were seriously wrong and 20% had major inaccuracies, from hallucinations or outdated sources.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.”