[Fuzz]

https://bsky.app/profile/techmeme.co.../3lk2yynastr2n

We found 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.

Across different platforms, the level of inaccuracy varied, with Perplexity answering 37 percent of the queries incorrectly, while Grok 3 had a much higher error rate, answering 94 percent of the queries incorrectly.

In spite of this, Howard, the COO of Time, maintains optimism about future improvements: “I have a line internally that I say every time somebody brings me anything about any one of these platforms—my response back is, ‘Today is the worst that the product will ever be.’ With the size of the engineering teams, the size of the investments in engineering, I believe that it’s just going to continue to get better. If anybody as a consumer is right now believing that any of these free products are going to be 100 percent accurate, then shame on them.”

https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/we-co...iting-news.php


Huh.