'NewsGuard AI' Bot Claims to Provide Only Reliable News

NewsGuard launched its pioneering AI chatbot to aggregate content from "reliable news websites" only.

NewsGuard's Announcement: NewsGuard AI, established on Tuesday, promotes 12,000 media sources, including think tanks and magazines, that NewsGuard journalists deem "reliable." Evaluations are reportedly based on nine "apolitical basic journalistic criteria" and 41 editorial standards. The chatbot cites all sources, some of which are "Co-marketing Partners," and promises to compensate publishers 50-50. Its functions include NewsGuard "reliability scores" and ratings for over 36,000 sources, local to global news updates, and the ability to "send a detailed debunk to a misinformed friend or relative." NewsGuard launched the adjacent "NewsGuard for AI" in 2023 "to train AI models to recognize all the significant top false narratives spreading online."

RELATED: AllSides Bias Checker™ | AllSides

Accusations of Bias: The Washington Free Beacon (Right bias) accused NewsGuard last week of giving American outlets on the right lower reliability scores than outlets owned by state-funded "propaganda" outlets. The Beacon criticized that the company "gives the state-owned China Daily a reliability score of 44.5—more than twice the score of the conservative outlet Newsmax, which earns just 20." It furthered, "Visitors to The Federalist and One America News Network likewise risk 'being significantly misled on important topics,' scoring 17.5 and 22.5 respectively. China Global Television Network, on the other hand—which NewsGuard describes as a 'mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party'—scores a 44.5, just 5 points shy of the Daily Wire (49.5)."

RELATED: How Does AllSides Rate Media Bias? | AllSides

Key Quotes: "NewsGuard AI's ability to use the proprietary NewsGuard ratings data means that no hoaxes being peddled by Russian or Chinese disinformation networks will infect its answers," the website states. "Nor will sites posing as local news that are actually being secretly funded by political activists on one side or the other. Nor will those pushing inaccurate healthcare information, phony claims about consumer products, or repeatedly pushing provably false claims to promote one side or the other in political debates from Boston to Beijing." The company credited itself with "solving the AI misinformation problem," and Chief Operating Officer Matt Skibinski said the chatbot provides "reliable research while not substituting for students doing their own writing and thinking."

Media Responses: NewsGuard's press release gave voice to support from The Atlantic (Left), fact-checker Snopes (Lean Left) and libertarian magazine Reason (Center) – all "Co-marketing Partners" for the project – but it did not give voice to outlets on the right. Snopes CEO Chris Richmond stated, "Snopes has restricted most AI chatbots from scraping our content, but we're happy to partner with NewsGuard on a model that does this the right way."

Straight Arrow News' (Center) test of the chatbot concluded "its output resembled the responses from other leading chatbots… But its citations were more robust." The Beacon criticized NewsGuard's ratings as "a stark example of how one of the top disinformation watchdogs of the Biden era is hoping to embed its worldview into generative AI, turning what critics say are biased judgments about credibility into notionally objective training data."

RELATED: Media Research Center Finds Newsguard Ratings More Favorable to Left-Wing Outlets | AllSides

Written by the AllSides staff (of humans). Learn more. Support our mission. Suggest an improvement to this summary.