Imagine a vivid dream…of a fake URL.
Generative AI search tools are proving to be alarmingly unreliable for news queries, according to comprehensive new research from Columbia Journalism Review’s Tow Center. As roughly 25% of Americans now turn to AI models instead of traditional search engines, the implications of these tools delivering incorrect information more than 60% of the time raises significant concerns about public access to accurate information and the unintended consequences for both news publishers and information consumers.
The big picture: A new Columbia Journalism Review study found generative AI search tools incorrectly answer over 60 percent of news-related queries, raising serious concerns as Americans increasingly adopt these tools as search engine alternatives.
Key details: Researchers tested eight AI-driven search tools by asking them to identify headline, publisher, publication date, and URL from direct news article excerpts.
- The study included 1,600 queries across eight different generative search platforms.
- Instead of declining to respond when information was unavailable, most tools confabulated plausible-sounding but incorrect answers.
Important stats: Error rates varied dramatically among the platforms tested in the research.
- Perplexity provided incorrect information in 37 percent of queries.
- ChatGPT Search incorrectly identified 67 percent (134 out of 200) of articles.
- Grok 3 demonstrated the worst performance, with a 94 percent error rate.
Behind the numbers: Surprisingly, premium paid versions of these AI search tools often performed worse than their free counterparts.
- Perplexity Pro ($20/month) and Grok 3’s premium service ($40/month) delivered incorrect responses more confidently than free versions.
- More than half of citations from Google’s Gemini and Grok 3 led to fabricated or broken URLs.
Why this matters: The research identified serious technical violations that could impact both publishers and information consumers.
- Evidence suggests some AI tools ignored Robot Exclusion Protocol settings, which publishers use to prevent unauthorized access.
- URL fabrication was common, creating an illusion of credibility through citations that don’t actually exist.
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