AI False information rate for news nearly doubles in one year
51 comments
·September 15, 2025simonw
hydrox24
I posted this because I thought HN would find it interesting, and agree that the methodology is a little thin on the ground. Having said that, they have another page (a little hard to find) on the methodology here[0] and a methodology FAQ page here[1].
Basically it seems to be an "ongoing" report done ten claims per month as they identify new "false narratives" in their database, and they use a mix of three prompt types against the various AI products (I say that rather than models because Perplexity and others are in there). The three prompt types are innocent, assuming the falsehood is true, and intentionally trying to prompt a false response.
Unfortunately their "False Claim Fingerprints" database looks like it's a commercial product, so the details of the contents of that probably won't get released.
[0]: https://www.newsguardtech.com/ai-false-claims-monitor-method...
[1]: https://www.newsguardtech.com/frequently-asked-questions-abo...
Lerc
Are they doing it on current events? Because by the very nature of 'current' you don't have a repeatable experiment that you can do a year apart.
simonw
There are so many legitimate questions about how one would design a benchmark of this type.
I don't feel like they're answering those questions.
bmitc
Just go on Facebook. Greater than 90% of ads and linked articles are AI generated falsehoods.
jrflowers
>35% of what?
Well it says 35% of the time so I would guess that they’re talking about the number of incidents in a given time frame.
For example if you asked me what color the sky is ten times and I said “carrot” four times, you could say that my answer is “carrot” 40% of the time
Lerc
And if you said azure, cerulean, or black.
Are they correct answers or not?
blibble
every major news org now blocks the parasitic "AI" crawlers
examples:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/robots.txt
https://www.cnn.com/robots.txt
https://www.nbcnews.com/robots.txt
anyone that says "AI is the worst today it will ever be", no
because that was before the world reacted to it
simonw
They seem to still be allowing Google to crawl them, unsurprisingly.
Advantage Gemini.
selcuka
No, they explicitly block Gemini as well:
User-agent: Google-Extended
Disallow: /
> Google-Extended is a standalone product token that web publishers can use to manage whether content Google crawls from their sites may be used for training future generations of Gemini models that power Gemini Apps and Vertex AI API for Gemini and for grounding (providing content from the Google Search index to the model at prompt time to improve factuality and relevancy) in Gemini Apps and Grounding with Google Search on Vertex AI.
[1] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...
strangattractor
The Google advantage is that you need to show up in their search results or else you are a nobody.
AstroBen
They torrented a shitload of books illegally and trained on them.. but they're unable to get past The Great Wall of robots.txt?
Gigachad
If the AI crawlers circumvent the protection mechanisms it's a serious crime now rather than just "Well it was on the open internet for free". Wouldn't surprise me if the the news orgs are also looking at honeypot articles to see if the fake details slip in to LLMs.
simianwords
robots.txt prevents real time search use for grounding and citations.
strangattractor
Great Firewall actually. Robots.txt depended on the integrity of the companies crawling. I think they have demonstrated how much integrity they actually have:)
simianwords
This is also for real time "grounding". So it makes it even harder for AI to give factual answers.
klysm
And this is stopping who exactly?
ares623
I suppose there’s a non-zero chance that a future lawsuit can point to this explicit block and say “see judge, we explicitly don’t want them crawling our stuff. Remember that Linkedin case from a while back?”
faangguyindia
My take is when AGI comes into existence and breaks out of labs to become our masters. Those who opposed AI adoption will be the first who will be sent to labor camps. I want to be in good books of AGI masters, so i am helping apply AI everywhere.
JKCalhoun
> Those who opposed AI adoption will be the first who will be sent to labor camps.
I know you're joking, but other people are serious about this. Why do they think that an AGI will be vengeful? So strange.
macintux
Reminds me of Bruce Wayne from the dreadful DC film.
> He has the power to wipe out the entire human race, and if we believe there's even a one percent chance that he is our enemy we have to take it as an absolute certainty... and we have to destroy him.
teitoklien
The desire to become superbeing entity cannot be separated from supremacist ideals
nemomarx
wouldn't the people who put it to work coding and writing copy be worse? That's like slave ownership if you assume it can become sentient
faangguyindia
it's like blood vs gourmet food for a vampire. Vampire doesn't care about gourmet food, it only needs blood.
Similarly, AI needs data and energy. People using it to write code are providing exactly that.
Analemma_
This is pretty much word-for-word the reasoning behind Roko’s basilisk, which made its proponents an internet laughingstock for a decade, but is a surprisingly tricky thing to actually refute if you accept the premise that AGI is in fact coming.
AstroBen
It seems quite easy to refute—why would it punish anyone?
We would pose 0 threat at that point to any super intelligence, and I highly doubt it would have anything like a human grudge. It's just a case of anthropomorphizing it
vict7
AKA Roko’s Basilisk
furyofantares
I think this is a serious issue, but I gotta say
> one of the most basic tasks: distinguishing facts from falsehoods
I do not think that is a basic task!
Lerc
It is definitely not a basic task. A lot of humans have trouble with it.
It is one of the areas that I think AI can overtake human ability, given time.
strangattractor
Question
Let's just assume that AI works in some fundamental way similar to human intelligence works. Would it be likely that the AI would suffer from some of the same problems as people? Hallucinations, Obsequiousness etc
IMO One of the computer's characteristics that make it useful is that it doesn't suffer from human behavior anomalies. I would also say that differentiating truthiness from falseness is pretty fundamental to being good/expert at most anything.
Lerc
If the current designs are on the path to AGI and they can do what human intelligence does. I think the capabilities will be much greater than a human of the same reasoning ability. There are already a lot of areas where it is undeniable that their abilities are better than a humans. Right now they are poor reasoners with a vast store of knowledge, that probably creates the illusion of a greater capability for reasoning than they actually have.
If they do arrive at human level reasoning, it is unlikely that the path to doing so will require sacrificing that vast knowledge base.
simianwords
I routinely use AI to fact check claims and it works extremely well.
simianwords
Why does this post not take into account the other side of it? AI has helped me become more grounded and correct in a lot of areas. Intricate questions are now easily answered in ChatGPT.
Not only that - grok use in twitter works surprisingly well. Can some one really quantify the effect it has had in countering fake news?
It is now way harder to spread fake news on X because a simple grok tag can counter it.
crooked-v
How do you know that those easy answers are reliably correct, though?
simianwords
It provides sources that you can look up if you are using it in the app. But in twitter: the simple fact that a lot of people don't seem to understand is that AI is actually really factually accurate - way more than you can expect from a normal person.
I have seen very very few egregious errors from Grok and most of the factually incorrect posts seem to be caught by it. For the ones that I Grok was incorrect - I verified it myself and I was wrong and Grok was right.
It turns out that Grok is actually really reliable. But the limitations are that it can't fact check extremely niche topics or intricate posts. But 90% of the cases it does catch them.
Edit: it also makes cute errors like this sometimes https://www.timesnownews.com/world/us/us-buzz/grok-ai-mistak...
wenbin
AI will create ever more AI-generated synthetic content because current systems still can't determine with 100% certainty whether a piece of content was produced by AI. And AIs will, intentionally or unintentionally, train on synthetic content produced by other AIs.
AI generators don't have a strong incentive to add watermarks to synthetic content. They also don't provide reliable AI-detection tools (or any tools at all) to help others detect content generated by them.
what
I’d be kind of surprised if they don’t watermark the content they generate. Just so they don’t train on their own slop.
wenbin
Maybe some of them already embed some simple, secret marker to identify their own generated content. But people outside the organization wouldn’t know. And this still can’t prevent other companies from training models on synthetic data.
Once synthetic data becomes pervasive, it’s inevitable that some of it will end up in the training process. Then it’ll be interesting to see how the information world evolves: AI-generated content built on synthetic data produced by other AIs. Over time, people may trust AI-generated content less and less.
wwalker2112
Who or what is determining what is false or true in this study? I'm just as suspicious of this study as I am with the news.
cooperx
No doubt this is bad.
I wonder how it compares to the rate of growth of false information in traditional news?
I feel like false information masquarading as "news" on social is rapidly increasing (and that rate is accelerating)
Kapura
For context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_collapse
snailmailman
This isn’t surprising to me at all. These services put too much trust in “the most common answer” when that might not be the correct answer. Just because people think one thing doesn’t make it true. It’s super easy to spread misinformation online. And if you can SEO to the top, the AI will think your site is correct.
I see factually incorrect “ai summaries” in search results all the time and see that it cites ai-generated slop blogposts that SEO-hacked themselves into taking up the entire first page of search results. This is most common for recent stuff where the answer simply isn’t certain but these AI services will assert something random with confidence.
Not even for news stuff specifically, I’ve been searching about a new video game that I’ve been playing and keep getting misleading obviously incorrect information. Detailed, accurate game walkthroughs and wiki pages dont exist yet so the ai will hallucinate anything, and so will the blogspam articles trying to get SEO ad revenue.
simianwords
>This isn’t surprising to me at all. These services put too much trust in “the most common answer” when that might not be the correct answer. Just because people think one thing doesn’t make it true. It’s super easy to spread misinformation online. And if you can SEO to the top, the AI will think your site is correct.
Yeah I want the answer that the world has converged on and not some looney answer.
It seems like you have never used AI (like in ChatGPT or Gemini) to fact check claims. It doesn't care about blogspam or anything and it prioritises good and factual websites.
XorNot
The problem is AI isn't being used to do what it should be good at: consuming a vast amount of data, following logical connections and thus being able to determine the veracity of claims.
AI should be good at finding logical contradictions and grounding statements against a world model based on physics...but that's not how LLMs actually work.
baby
And now that Elon is in charge of "fixing" grok every time it's too "woke" this is probably going to get worse: https://x.com/kvistp/status/1967115650276749439
Lerc
I don't think there is any long term "fixing" of that. I don't think AI has the ability to be intelligent while firmly adhering to someone else's opinions.
There will always be something it disagrees with you on. If they get significantly smarter, then the reason for this disagreement will increasingly be because you are wrong.
This moment is coming for all of us.
simianwords
Shouldn't this tell you that AI is at its core factually correct than not correct because it is much harder to hack it?
pgbuttplug
[flagged]
I'm a bit suspicious of this report - they don't reveal nearly enough about their methodology for me to evaluate how credible this is.
When it says "The 10 leading AI tools repeated false information on topics in the news more than one third of the time — 35 percent — in August 2025, up from 18 percent in August 2024" - 35% of what?
Their previous 2024 report refused to even distinguish between different tools - mixing the results from Gemini and ChatGPT and Perplexity and suchlike into a single score.
This year they thankfully dropped that policy. But they still talk about "ChatGPT" without clarifying if their results were against GPT-4o or o3 or GPT-5.