"Fifty-one percent of responses were judged to have “significant issues” in at least one of these areas, the BBC found. Google Gemini fared the worst overall, with significant issues judged in just over 60 percent of responses, while Perplexity performed best, with just over 40 percent showing such issues.

Accuracy ended up being the biggest problem across all four LLMs, with significant issues identified in over 30 percent of responses (with the “some issues” category having significantly more). That includes one in five responses where the AI response incorrectly reproduced “dates, numbers, and factual statements” that were erroneously attributed to BBC sources. And in 13 percent of cases where an LLM quoted from a BBC article directly (eight out of 62), the analysis found those quotes were “either altered from the original source or not present in the cited article.”

Some LLM-generated inaccuracies here were subtle points of fact, such as two responses claiming an energy price cap was “UK-wide,” even though Northern Ireland was exempted. Others were more directly incorrect, such as one that said the NHS “advises people not to start vaping”—the BBC coverage makes clear that the NHS recommends vaping as an effective way to quit smoking."

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/02/bbc-finds-significant-inaccuracies-in-over-30-of-ai-produced-news-summaries/

"As members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have fanned out across the government in recent days, attention has focused on the young Silicon Valley engineers who are wielding immense power in the new administration.

But ProPublica has identified three lawyers with elite establishment credentials who have also joined the DOGE effort.

Two are former Supreme Court clerks — one clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts, another for Justice Neil Gorsuch — and the third has been selected to be a Gorsuch clerk for the 2025-2026 term.

Two of the lawyers’ names have not been previously reported as working for DOGE.

All three — Keenan Kmiec, James Burnham and Jacob Altik — have DOGE email addresses at the Executive Office of the President, according to records reviewed by ProPublica. Altik was recently an attorney at the firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges, but his bio page is now offline. Neither the White House nor any of the three lawyers immediately responded to requests for comment about their roles.

Referring to DOGE work, the White House told ProPublica in a statement earlier this week that, “Those leading this mission with Elon Musk are doing so in full compliance with federal law.”"

https://www.propublica.org/article/elon-musk-doge-lawyers-supreme-court

@[email protected] No… My name is Miguel Caetano and I’m from Portugal :)

@[email protected] I wish! :-D But I probably will not be able to write like that within my lifetime… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pankaj_Mishra

“I wrote in late February that we are seeing some kind of collapse in the free world. The evidence has accumulated with ominous frequency since then. Perhaps it should not be surprising. The intellectual incompetence and moral turpitude of the fourth estate was diagnosed right from the time Kraus warned against “the intellectual self-annihilation of mankind by means of its press.” Looking ahead to our own era, Gandhi predicted that even “the states that are today nominally democratic” are likely to “become frankly totalitarian” since a regime in which “the weakest go to the wall” and a “few capitalist owners” thrive “cannot be sustained except by violence, veiled if not open.” Vaclav Havel, celebrated as an anticommunist “dissident” in the West, actually argued in his essay “Politics and Conscience” (1984) that totalitarian systems in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe represented the future of the Western world; he warned against the power that operates “outside all conscience, a power grounded in an omnipresent ideological fiction which can rationalize anything without ever having to brush against the truth.””

"Today, each one of the assumptions that underpinned western policymaking and journalism for nearly three decades lie shattered. We live in a world where the future of democracy is not assured even in Europe and America, let alone India. Western-style capitalism has generated far too much inequality and now engenders a vicious backlash. Demagogues and despotic leaders are in the ascendant. Most disturbingly, white nationalism is yet again, after a long hiatus, the explicit ideology of mainstream political parties on both sides of the Atlantic.

At a time of widespread economic distress, ethnonationalists in the United States and United Kingdom as well as Germany, France, Hungary, Poland and Italy are united by their antipathy to immigrants, and targeting of institutions deemed insufficiently patriotic or indulgent of sexual, ethnic and racial minorities. This bleak scenario can be further elaborated. The main economic ideologies of endless growth and global prosperity have come up against environmental constraints and technological innovation, as well as built-in limits, and look unsustainable.

Editors and writers in hallowed periodicals were never mentally prepared for the collapse of their ideology of capitalist globalization and the rapid diminishment of Western power, legitimacy, and prestige. They were too attached, by national and class origin, and training, to the intellectual assumptions developed during the unchallenged hegemony of the West. Personally too implicated in the death-agonies of the old world, they cannot now feel the birth-pangs of the new. Indeed, they struggle to comprehend their own societies as these drastically change around them; they obsess over mere symptoms of a splintered social consensus such as “culture wars” and end up wringing meaning out of abstractions like “populism,” “democratic backsliding,” and “crisis of liberalism.”"