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When it comes to errors, I realize I work in a glass house.
Over my 38-year career at the Free Press, I’ve made a few mistakes, including one glaring gaffe: I once wrote that a Supreme Court nominee had undergone a “pubic” examination on Parliament Hill when I meant to type “public.”
Such is the nature of our history-on-the-run business.
Nothing’s as thorough as a pubic grilling. (Free Press archives)
But even when you add my errors to the Free Press’s errata over the last 154 years, our missteps are nothing compared with the volume of falsehoods being generated by Google’s AI Overviews, even as I type this message to you.
AI Overviews are the small blocks of AI-generated text that now appear at the top of Google search results, purporting to summarize the information you’re trying to find.
But a new analysis has found those summaries include wrong information 10 per cent of the time.
Given the number of search queries Google processes every minute of every day, mistakes are being made at an industrial level that’s unparalleled, unprecedented — and unnerving.
Some quick math to put the scale of the problem in perspective. Google responds to roughly five trillion queries a year. That translates into tens of millions of inaccurate answers every hour, based on the analysis the New York Times used for its reporting. In the minute that it has taken you to reach this sentence, that could add up to hundreds of thousands of errors, thanks to AI.
The Free Press would have long gone out of business if we got the story right only nine times out of 10.
But those standards don’t seem to apply to the companies now dominating the information ecosystem — and creating a misinformation crisis in the process.
We’ll have more to say about AI’s impact on the local media landscape this weekend in a deep dive Eva Wasney takes into a media outlet that claims to be an altruistic alternative to mainstream media in Manitoba.
In the meantime, the Free Press will continue to put facts first — and when we do make an error, we’ll correct the record transparently, in print and online.
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