How to Solve AI’s Community News Problem

Two reports came out this week that ought to make tech leaders think very differently about how AI assistants deal with news.

The first study, by the European Broadcasting Union, reported that ChatGPT was confidently reporting that Pope Francis was still the Pontiff, months after he died – and that 20% of answers by AI assistants to news-related questions had “major accuracy issues, including hallucinated details and outdated information.”

To be fair, tech leaders have always said accuracy will improve as systems gobble up all the reliable news out there. And the study has its critics, but the findings are nevertheless concerning.

Which leads us to the second report, the State of Local News 2025 by the Medill Journalism School at Northwestern University – which found that reliable local news may be going the way of the manual typewriter. Some 3,500 newspapers have closed since 2005, almost 40 percent of the total, they found. There’s also been a 75 percent drop in the number of journalists. Even in areas with local news outlets, they are often “ghost newspapers” providing minimal or superficial local coverage.

In other words, while AI companies may indeed be able to fix the wrong-Pope problem (and other facts involving national or global matters) by changing their code, local news presents an entirely different problem. In tech terms, this represents rampant data poverty.