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Weekly News Digest
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March 13, 2025 — In addition to this week's NewsBreaks article and the monthly NewsLink Spotlight, Information Today, Inc. (ITI) offers Weekly News Digests that feature recent product news and company announcements. Watch for additional coverage to appear in the next print issue of Information Today.
CLICK HERE to view more Weekly News Digest items.
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Studies Find That AI Chatbots Are Not Good News Sources
Klaudia Jazwinska and Aisvarya Chandrasekar write for Columbia Journalism Review that “while traditional search engines typically operate as an intermediary, guiding users to news websites and other quality content, generative search tools parse and repackage information themselves, cutting off traffic flow to original sources. These chatbots’ conversational outputs often obfuscate serious underlying issues with information quality. There is an urgent need to evaluate how these systems access, present, and cite news content.” The authors tested eight generative AI search tools and found (in part) that:- Chatbots were generally bad at declining to answer questions they couldn’t answer accurately, offering incorrect or speculative answers instead.
- Premium chatbots provided more confidently incorrect answers than their free counterparts.
- Multiple chatbots seemed to bypass Robot Exclusion Protocol preferences.
- Generative search tools fabricated links and cited syndicated and copied versions of articles.
- Content licensing deals with news sources provided no guarantee of accurate citation in chatbot responses.
In February, the BBC released research that “provides a warning around the use of AI assistants to answer questions about news, with factual errors and the misrepresentation of source material affecting AI assistants.” These findings include: - 51% of all AI answers to questions about the news were judged to have significant issues of some form
- 19% of AI answers which cited BBC content introduced factual errors—incorrect factual statements, numbers and dates
- 13% of the quotes sourced from BBC articles were either altered or didn’t actually exist in that article.
In Information Today, ITI NewsBreaks’ print counterpart, Database Review columnist Mick O’Leary has been analyzing AI search tools. Check out “The AI Web Search Fray” in the March/April 2025 issue, and his other recent tests, including AI Overviews: An AI Chatbot on the Internet’s Front Page” from the September 2024 issue and “Claude and the Pursuit of AI Safety” from the April 2024 issue.
Send correspondence concerning the Weekly News Digest to NewsBreaks Editor
Brandi Scardilli
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