AI chatbots unable to accurately summarise news, BBC finds
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That's why I avoid them like the plague. I've even changed almost every platform I'm using to get away from the AI-pocalypse.
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Why do you say that? I have had no reason to doubt their reporting
It's a "how the mighty have fallen" kind of thing. They are well into the click-bait farm mentality now - have been for a while.
It's present on the news sites, but far worse on things where they know they steer opinion and discourse.
They used to ensure political parties has coverage inline with their support, but for like 10 years prior to Brexit, they gave Farage and his Jackasses hugely disproportionate coverage - like 20X more than their base. This was at a time when SNP were doing very well and were frequently seen less than 2006 to 2009.Current reporting is heavily spun and they definitely aren't the worst in the world, but the are also definitely not the bastion of unbiased news I grew up with.
Until relatively recently you could see the deterioration by flipping to the world service, but that's fallen into line now.
If you have the time to follow independent journalists the problem becomes clearer, if not, look at output from parody news sites - it's telling that Private Eye and Newsthump manage the criticism that the BBC can't seem to get too
Go look at the bylinetimes.com front page, grab a random stort and compare coverage with the BBC. One of these is crowd funded reporters and the other a national news site with great funding and legal obligations to report in the public interest.
I don't hate them, they just need to be better.
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I just tried it on deepseek it did it fine and gave the source for everything it mentioned as well.
Do you mean you rigorously went through a hundred articles, asking DeepSeek to summarise them and then got relevant experts in the subject of the articles to rate the quality of answers? Could you tell us what percentage of the summaries that were found to introduce errors then? Literally 0?
Or do you mean that you tried having DeepSeek summarise a couple of articles, didn't see anything obviously problematic, and figured it is doing fine? Replacing rigorous research and journalism by humans with a couple of quick AI prompts, which is the core of the issue that the article is getting at. Because if so, please reconsider how you evaluate (or trust others' evaluations of) information tools which might help or help destroy democracy.
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Funny, I find the BBC unable to accurately convey the news
Yeah, haha
Perplexity misquoted BBC News in a story about the Middle East, saying Iran initially showed "restraint" and described Israel's actions as "aggressive"
Perplexity did fail to summarize the article, but it did correct it.
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I work in tech and can confirm the the vast majority of engineers "dislike ai" and are disillusioned with AI tools. Even ones that work on AI/ML tools. It's fewer and fewer people the higher up the pay scale you go.
There isn't a single complex coding problem an AI can solve. If you don't understand something and it helps you write it I'll close the MR and delete your code since it's worthless. You have to understand what you write. I do not care if it works. You have to understand every line.
"But I use it just fine and I'm an..."
Then you're not an engineer and you shouldn't have a job. You lack the intelligence, dedication and knowledge needed to be one. You are detriment to your team and company.
That's some weird gatekeeping. Why stop there? Whoever is using a linter is obviously too stupid to write clean code right off the bat. Syntax highlighting is for noobs.
I full-heartedly dislike people that think they need to define some arcane rules how a task is achieved instead of just looking at the output.
Accept that you probably already have merged code that was generated by AI and it's totally fine as long as tests are passing and it fits the architecture.
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BBC is probably salty the AI is able to insert the word Israel alongside a negative term in the headline
Some examples of inaccuracies found by the BBC included:
Gemini incorrectly said the NHS did not recommend vaping as an aid to quit smoking ChatGPT and Copilot said Rishi Sunak and Nicola Sturgeon were still in office even after they had left Perplexity misquoted BBC News in a story about the Middle East, saying Iran initially showed "restraint" *and described Israel's actions as "aggressive"* -
Ask a forest burning machine to read the surrounding treads for you, then you will find the arguments you're looking for. You have at least 80% chance it will produce something coherent, and unknown chance of there being something correct, but hey, reading is hard amirite?
"If you try hard you might find arguments for my side"
What kind of meta-argument is that supposed to be?
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That's why I avoid them like the plague. I've even changed almost every platform I'm using to get away from the AI-pocalypse.
I can't stand the corporate double think.
Despite the mountains of evidence that AI is not capable of something even basic as reading an article and telling you what is about it's still apparently going to replace humans. How do they come to that conclusion?
The world won't be destroyed by AI, It will be destroyed by idiot venture capitalist types who reckon that AI is the next big thing. Fire everyone, replace it all with AI; then nothing will work and nobody will be able to buy anything because nobody has a job.
Que global economic collapse.
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the more you know what you are doing the less impressed you are by ai. calling people that trust ai idiots is not a good start to a conversation though
It's not like they're flat earthers they are not conspiracy theorists. They have been told by the media, businesses, and every goddamn YouTuber that AI is the future.
I don't think they are idiots I just think they are being lied to and are a bit gullible. But it's not worth having the argument with them, AI is going to fail on its own it doesn't matter what they think.
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This is my personal take. As long as you're careful and thoughtful whenever using them, they can be extremely useful.
Could you tell me what you use it for because I legitimately don't understand what I'm supposed to find helpful about the thing.
We all got sent an email at work a couple of weeks back telling everyone that they want ideas for a meeting next month about how we can incorporate AI into the business. I'm heading IT, so I'm supposed to be able to come up with some kind of answer and yet I have nothing. Even putting the side the fact that it probably doesn't work as advertised, I still can't really think of a use for it.
The main problem is it won't be able to operate our ancient and convoluted ticketing system, so it can't actually help.
Everyone I've ever spoken to has said that they use it for DMing or story prompts. All very nice but not really useful.
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I learned that AI chat bots aren't necessarily trustworthy in everything. In fact, if you aren't taking their shit with a grain of salt, you're doing something very wrong.
Treat LLMs like a super knowledgeable, enthusiastic, arrogant, unimaginative intern.
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Could you tell me what you use it for because I legitimately don't understand what I'm supposed to find helpful about the thing.
We all got sent an email at work a couple of weeks back telling everyone that they want ideas for a meeting next month about how we can incorporate AI into the business. I'm heading IT, so I'm supposed to be able to come up with some kind of answer and yet I have nothing. Even putting the side the fact that it probably doesn't work as advertised, I still can't really think of a use for it.
The main problem is it won't be able to operate our ancient and convoluted ticketing system, so it can't actually help.
Everyone I've ever spoken to has said that they use it for DMing or story prompts. All very nice but not really useful.
Great for turning complex into simple.
Bad for turning simple into complex.
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Treat LLMs like a super knowledgeable, enthusiastic, arrogant, unimaginative intern.
Super knowledgeable but with patchy knowledge, so they'll confidently say something that practically everyone else in the company knows is flat out wrong.
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benchmarks
Benchmarks are so gamed, even Chatbot Arena is kinda iffy. TBH you have to test them with your prompts yourself.
Honestly I am getting incredible/creative responses from Deepseek R1, the hype is real. Tencent's API is a bit under-rated. If llama 3.3 70B is smart enough for you, Cerebras API is super fast.
MiniMax is ok for long context, but I still tend to lean on Gemini for this.
What are the local use cases? I'm running on a 3060ti but output is always inferior to the free tier of the various providers.
Can I justify an upgrade to a 4090 (or more)?
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I recently had one chatbot refuse to answer a couple of questions, and another delete my question after warning me that my question was verging on breaking its rule... never happened before, thought it was interesting.
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Great for turning complex into simple.
Bad for turning simple into complex.
I think my largest gripe with it is it can't actually do anything. It can just tell you about stuff.
I can ask it how to change the desktop background on my computer and it will 100% be able to tell me, but if you then prompt it to change the background itself it won't be able to. It has zero ability to interact with the computer, this is even the case with AI run locally.
It can't move the mouse around it can't send keyboard commands.
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I can't stand the corporate double think.
Despite the mountains of evidence that AI is not capable of something even basic as reading an article and telling you what is about it's still apparently going to replace humans. How do they come to that conclusion?
The world won't be destroyed by AI, It will be destroyed by idiot venture capitalist types who reckon that AI is the next big thing. Fire everyone, replace it all with AI; then nothing will work and nobody will be able to buy anything because nobody has a job.
Que global economic collapse.
It's a race, and bullshitting brings venture capital and therefore an advantage.
99.9% of AI companies will go belly up when Investors start asking for results.
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"If you try hard you might find arguments for my side"
What kind of meta-argument is that supposed to be?
If you read what people write, you will understand what they're trying to tell you. Shocking concept, I know. It's much easier to imagine someone in your head, paint him as a soyjack and yourself as a chadjack and epicly win an argument.
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I think my largest gripe with it is it can't actually do anything. It can just tell you about stuff.
I can ask it how to change the desktop background on my computer and it will 100% be able to tell me, but if you then prompt it to change the background itself it won't be able to. It has zero ability to interact with the computer, this is even the case with AI run locally.
It can't move the mouse around it can't send keyboard commands.
Um… yea? It’s not supposed to? Let’s ignore how dangerous and foolish it would be to allow llm’s admin control of a system. The thing that prevents it from doing that is well, the llm has no mechanism to do that. The best it could do is ask you to open a command line and give you some code to put in. Its kinda like asking siri to preheat your oven. It didn’t have access to your ovens system.
You COULD get a digital only stove, and the llm could be changed to give it to reach out side itself, but its not there yet, and with how much siri miss interprets things, there would be a lot more fires
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If they think AI is working for them then he can. If you think AI is an effective tool for any profession you are a clown. If my son's preschool teacher used it to make a lesson plan she would be incompetent. If a plumber asked what kind of wrench he needed he would be kicked out of my house. If an engineer of one of my teams uses it to write code he gets fired.
AI "works" because you're asking questions you don't know and it's just putting words together so they make sense without regard to accuracy. It's a hard limit of "AI" that we've hit. It won't get better in our lifetimes.
Anyone blindly saying a tool is ineffective for every situation that exists in the world is a tool themselves.
