You deserve the truth, not AI’s interpretation of it

We all want to understand the world around us.

- By EBU Director of News LIZ CORBIN, and CEO of WAN-IFRA VINCENT PEYREGNE

Perhaps we want more clarity about the war in Gaza, or what our government is doing about the healthcare our family relies on. It might be something as simple as changes to a bus route that will affect our daily commute. No matter how momentous or mundane the issue, we have a right to news we can trust.

We’ve all been there, scrolling our feed, seeing an astonishing clip, or a shocking must-share story. But now we must constantly question what’s real and what’s the creation of artificial intelligence.

Al-generated output is so convincing today and shaping so much of the information we consume that we risk being unable to trust anything anymore. And mistrust is the fuel that drives conspiracism, social polarization and democratic disengagement.

In reality, the integrity of what we call ‘news’ is being eroded by the tools that are meant to help us make sense of the world.

This World News Day, we want to underline that the public are entitled to the facts that professional journalists and the organizations they work for worldwide are committed to finding, corroborating and sharing.

However, the tech companies building AI systems that millions of people use daily are falling far short of their responsibility to truth.

Original research carried out this year by the BBC found that half of AI-generated answers to news-related requests left out important details and made other key errors.

The Al assistants they tested consistently churned out garbled facts, fabricated or misattributed quotes, decontextualized information or paraphrased reporting with no acknowledgement.