AI Search Engines Invent Sources for ~60% of Queries, Study Finds

AI search engines are like that friend of yours who claims to be an expert in a whole host of topics, droning on with authority even when they do not really know what they are talking about. A new research report from the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) has found that AI models from the likes of OpenAI and xAI will, when asked about a specific news event, more often than not, simply make up a story or get significant details wrong. The researchers fed various models direct excerpts from actual news stories and then asked them to identify information, including the article’s headline, publisher, and URL. Perplexity returned incorrect information 37 percent of the time, while at the extreme end, xAI’s Grok made details up 97 percent of the time. Errors included offering links to articles that did not go anywhere because the bot even made up the URL itself. Overall, researchers found the AI models spat out false information for 60 percent of the test queries. Sometimes, search engines ... Read full article.