Quick LinksCan You Use Generative AI for Your Daily News? 5 Services Compared 4 Reasons Why You Shouldn't Rely on AI Chatbots for Your News Key Takeaways AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Chatsonic, Perplexity, Copilot, and Gemini offer varying responses when delivering news updates. AI chatbots can struggle with providing accurate, consistent, and nuanced news updates due to limitations in prompt interpretation.
While AI offers advantages, it simultaneously poses challenges and ethical considerations, especially in daily news gathering. AI bots like ChatGPT, Chatsonic, Perplexity, Copilot, and Gemini reveal inconsistencies when fetching daily news updates.
Can You Use Generative AI for Your Daily News? 5 Services Compared
I tested the top-performing generative AI bots for daily news, receiving a diverse range of responses. AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Chatsonic, Perplexity, Copilot, and Gemini offer varying responses when delivering news updates due to differences in prompt interpretation, real-time limitations, and contextual background.
Here's how they stacked up.
ChatGPT (Free)
The free version of ChatGPT now features GPT-4o, OpenAI's upgraded AI model. While the free version of GPT-4o can connect to the internet, it has a limit of 16 questions within a 24-hour period, after which it reverts to the older GPT-3.5 model.
Typically, checking for the daily news with GPT-4o is useful. As you're only asking one question, such as, "Please give me today's news headlines" or similar, you don't use much of the free allocation for the more powerful model. Of course, you can probe for specific information, but it will eat into your daily limits. It's also worth noting that if you've used your daily allocation of GPT-4o messages, asking GPT-3.5 for a daily news update is basically pointless, as it doesn't have an active internet connection, and its training data cut-off is April 2023.
Asking ChatGPT for the daily news or some of the day's leading headlines was mostly useful, though there are some clear limitations when it comes to choosing sources, accurately detailing those sources, and providing a range of differing sources. For example, ChatGPT would quickly provide some of the leading headlines, which is great, but the URL provided as a source never links to any specific page, even if it is referencing a specific event.
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It also suggests old news, and that's not a limitation of the data cut-off point. A prime example can be found in the image above, where ChatGPT suggests that "Cybersecurity in the age of AI remains a critical topic, with industry experts like Amazon's Chief Security Officer Steve Schmidt discussing challenges and strategies to safeguard data," citing GeekWire as a source. Closer inspection revealed that, yes, GeekWire ran this story -- on June 15, 2024, nearly a month previous.
Chatsonic
Like ChatGPT, Chatsonic responded decently to requests for news headlines and daily news updates. It covered a good range of topics, too, such as current events, politics, business, technology, and entertainment. I also liked that it provided a short summary of the news story, which is handy for figuring out what you want to read.
However, Chatsonic's range of sources was a little iffy. For example, one search used the Hindustan Times (a generally center-leaning daily newspaper based in Delhi, India). While this is located on the other side of the world, it's a long-standing publication. Its second source was the Dryden Wire, "Northwest Wisconsin's #1 Digital News Outlet." Needless to say, this is somewhat more niche.
Now, I can see why this may have happened. On this particular day, one of the news headlines related to Wisconsin's primary election, held August 13, 2024. Chatsonic ran with a headline from this event, despite it being relatively small in terms of effect on the US Presidential election (scheduled for November 2024).
Perplexity
Perplexity's daily news offering was also somewhat useful; each time I asked for daily news, it provided a range of headlines from the past few weeks, some of which were literally breaking news.
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For example, asking specifically, "Could you give me today's news headlines from the USA?" delivered a top headline referring to the shooting event at a Donald Trump campaign event that took place on July 13, 2024 -- a full month before my search. Conversely, the next headline covered The United Auto Workers union filing charges against Donald Trump and Elon Musk, which happened hours before my prompt (on August 13, 2024).
A search for the UK news headlines delivered similar, mixed results. Headlines included a tragic attack and the sentencing of a controversial figure, both of which happened weeks before.
With Perplexity, it seems that you may have to try a couple of different prompts to get the most accurate news reporting. When I found the right combination, despite the erroneous headline story, the rest of the headlines were accurate and related to events of the day or the previous 24-48 hour period.
Microsoft Copilot
I was impressed with Copilot's choice of headlines and sources, although its range of topics and number of headlines was lacking compared to Perplexity. Each of the headlines, though, was current, covering either news from the day or the previous 24-48 hours.
On the other hand, its descriptions were incredibly short and to the point, which isn't useful as a straight-up way to read the news. Sure, it's useful as a jumping off point, but a single-line summary of a likely complex news story isn't really doing it justice.
It fared slightly worse when checking out tech news headlines, covering stories from the past week, and, interestingly, taking a headline from a podcast. So, not completely pointless, but definitely not "breaking news" on the day.
Gemini
Out of all of the AI chatbots tested for daily news, Gemini is perhaps the best -- though, as with the other options, it really depends on your prompt.
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A general prompt for the day's news headlines doesn't provide much information, with typically returning four or five headlines with almost zero analysis. But when prompted to provide more information or provide news with a little more of an outline, it duly does. Similarly, asking Gemini for the general tech headlines gave old news, stretching back weeks. But switching up the prompt to specifically ask, "What are the tech news headlines from today, please?" gave the most accurate list of recent and breaking news across any of the chatbots I tested.
The only downside is Gemini's general approach to sources. Instead of providing an individual link to each news story source, it throws a list of sources out at the end of its response, leaving you to search for the specific URL you need.
4 Reasons Why You Shouldn't Rely on AI Chatbots for Your News
While AI can provide a decent starting point for news information, AI chatbots also encounter significant limitations to be aware of. Here are six reasons why you shouldn't depend solely on AI chatbots for your daily news updates.
Lack of Nuance: AI may struggle to provide comprehensive and accurate summaries of news events. Daily news updates lack context, missing the emotional weight of stories, while AI has difficulty capturing human emotions such as grief, joy, or anger. Inconsistency: Although improving, you can't expect the same output from the same prompt, even using the same AI tool. You're likely to miss headlines, see incorrect headlines, and so on. Limited Coverage: As seen above, the range of news an AI chatbot provides is limited, even with an internet connection. The AI chatbot may use questionable sources, too. By extension, you're likely to miss out on niche topics (though, in fairness, this may be overcome with prompting). Hallucination: One of the biggest issues is AI hallucination, where the AI model effectively makes up information and presents it as fact. As generative AI models improve, hallucination is becoming slightly less of an issue, but when it comes to news, you want to know the information you're reading is accurate.
Following the final point, I didn't notice any AI hallucinations during my testing. While each of the five generative AI chatbots struggled to provide recent news, none of the news provided was a hallucination.
Overall, using AI to get my daily news was a mixed bag. Sure, the outputs were okay once I'd tweaked the prompts, but by that point, I could have just opened up my preferred news website, read the news, and got on with my day.
