By Olivia Le Poidevin

GENEVA (Reuters) -Leading AI assistants misrepresent news content in nearly half their responses, according to new research published on Wednesday by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and the BBC.

The international research studied 3,000 responses to questions about the news from leading artificial intelligence assistants - software applications that use AI to understand natural language commands to complete tasks for a user.

It assessed AI assistants in 14 languages for accuracy, sourcing and ability to distinguish opinion versus fact, including ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini and Perplexity.

Overall, 45% of the AI responses studied contained at least one significant issue, with 81% having some form of problem, the research showed.

Reuters has made contact with the companies to seek their comment on the findings.

Gemini, Google's AI assistant, has stated previously on its website that it welcomes feedback so that it can continue to improve the platform and make it more helpful to users.

OpenAI and Microsoft have previously said hallucinations - when an AI model generates incorrect or misleading information, often due to factors such as insufficient data - are an issue that they are seeking to resolve.

Perplexity says on its website that one of its "Deep Research" modes has 93.9% accuracy in terms of factuality.

SOURCING ERRORS

A third of AI assistants' responses showed serious sourcing errors such as missing, misleading or incorrect attribution, according to the study.

Some 72% of responses by Gemini, Google's AI assistant, had significant sourcing issues, compared to below 25% for all other assistants, it said.

Issues of accuracy were found in 20% of responses from all AI assistants studied, including outdated information, it said.

Examples cited by the study included Gemini incorrectly stating changes to a law on disposable vapes and ChatGPT reporting Pope Francis as the current Pope several months after his death.

Twenty-two public-service media organisations from 18 countries including France, Germany, Spain, Ukraine, Britain and the United States took part in the study.

With AI assistants increasingly replacing traditional search engines for news, public trust could be undermined, the EBU said.

"When people don’t know what to trust, they end up trusting nothing at all, and that can deter democratic participation," EBU Media Director Jean Philip De Tender said in a statement.

Some 7% of all online news consumers and 15% of those aged under 25 use AI assistants to get their news, according to the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2025.

The new report urged AI companies to be held accountable and to improve how their AI assistants respond to news-related queries.

(Reporting by Olivia Le Poidevin, Editing by Timothy Heritage)