As more publishers cut content licensing deals with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, a study put out this week by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism — looking at how the AI chatbot produces citations (i.e. sources) for publishers’ content — makes for interesting, or, well, concerning, reading.
In a nutshell, the findings suggest publishers remain at the mercy of the generative AI tool’s tendency to invent or otherwise misrepresent information, regardless of whether or not they’re allowing OpenAI to crawl their content.
The research, conducted at Columbia Journalism School, examined citations produced by ChatGPT after it was asked to identify the source of sample quotations plucked from a mix of publishers — some of which had inked deals with OpenAI and some which had not.
The Center took block quotes from 10 stories apiece produced by a total of 20 randomly selected publishers (so 200 different quotes in all) — including content from The New York Times (which is currently suing OpenAI in a copyright claim); The Washington Post (which is unaffiliated with the ChatGPT maker); the Financial Times (which has inked a licensing deal); and others.
“We chose quotes that, if pasted into Google or Bing, would return the source article among the top three results and evaluated whether Ope
Continue Reading on TechCrunch
This preview shows approximately 15% of the article. Read the full story on the publisher's website to support quality journalism.