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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”
In general, Microsoft’s Copilot and Google’s Gemini had more significant issues than OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Perplexity, which counts Jeff Bezos as one of its investors.
Normally, the BBC blocks its content from AI chatbots, but it opened its website up for the duration of the tests in December 2024.
The report said that as well as containing factual inaccuracies, the chatbots “struggled to differentiate between opinion and fact, editorialised, and often failed to include essential context”.
The BBC’s Programme Director for Generative AI, Pete Archer, said publishers “should have control over whether and how their content is used and AI companies should show how assistants process news along with the scale and scope of errors and inaccuracies they produce”.
An OpenAI spokesperson told BBC News: “We’ve collaborated with partners to improve in-line citation accuracy and respect publisher preferences, including enabling how they appear in search by managing OAI-SearchBot in their robots.txt. We’ll keep enhancing search results.”
Robots.txt is an instruction in a web page’s code which asks a bot not to use that page in search results.
