A new study from Columbia Journalism Review’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism has uncovered serious accuracy issues with generative AI models used for news searches. According to the study, AI search engines have a startling error rate of 60 percent when queried about the news.
Ars Technica reports that the research tested eight AI-driven search tools equipped with live search functionality and discovered that the AI models incorrectly answered more than 60 percent of queries about news sources. This is particularly concerning given that roughly 1 in 4 Americans now use AI models as alternatives to traditional search engines, according to the report by researchers Klaudia Jaźwińska and Aisvarya Chandrasekar.
Error rates varied significantly among the platforms tested. Perplexity provided incorrect information in 37 percent of queries, while ChatGPT Search was wrong 67 percent of the time. Elon Musk’s Grok 3 had the highest error rate at 94 percent. For the study, researchers fed direct excerpts from real news articles to the AI models and asked each one to identify the headline, original publisher, publication date, and URL. In total, 1,600 queries were run across the eight generative search tools.
