We know that genAI/LLM chatbots aren't the most reliable sources of information. The BBC has released a study that adds some much-needed context to this idea:

(Source: "Groundbreaking BBC research shows issues with over half the answers from Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistants" 2025/02/11)

51% of all AI answers to questions about the news were judged to have significant issues of some form

19% of AI answers which cited BBC content introduced factual errors – incorrect factual statements, numbers and dates

13% of the quotes sourced from BBC articles were either altered or didn’t actually exist in that article.

Or, as I so eloquently put it a few months ago, in Complex Machinery:

A chatbot's entire job description is Just Make Some Shit Up. (It's in the name: everything that comes out of a genAI bot is, well, generated. We only apply the label "hallucinations" to the generated artifacts that we don't like.)