24th Sept 2026
Two recent studies show why human journalism matters more, not less, in the age of AI.
Researchers at the University of Hong Kong and Zhejiang University put six AI tools through a battery of research tasks. None consistently produced reliable results — and the systems failed in different ways.
Errors are common. Even the best-performing system made meaningful errors. The technical term is “hallucination”, when AI confidently states something false, or cites a source that does not exist or does not support the claim being made.
Errors snowball. Google’s and OpenAI’s tools showed what the researchers call “early-stage cascading”. More than 57% of the errors that later corrupted their reports could be traced back to a single bad step near the beginning of the research process.
The agents develop bad habits. They tend to favour the first information they find, even when better material appears later. They also favour repetitive, familiar content over fresh information.
They can struggle to recognise when there is no answer. When given questions for which no genuine answer existed, some systems confidently invented one almost every time.
The study’s conclusion is that these systems can produce output that looks authoritative, as it is neatly structured, confidently written and accompanied by links, while containing invented claims, misattributed sources and requirements that have been ignored.
A separate study by Product.ai, a company that verifies product information for AI shopping tools, tested several major AI agents with 220 real-world shopping questions.
It found a confirmed factual conflict in 86% of the questions, involving a price, a specification or whether a product was still current.
For errors that could actually cost a shopper money or result in the wrong product being purchased, Gemini recorded a rate of 56% on its free tier, while Claude recorded 44%.
We do assert because of that the AI is useless, for we do use it ourselves. However, it does show that information that looks convincing is not necessarily information that has been properly checked.
That distinction is at the heart of what we do at France Insider.
We go to the underlying data. We interrogate it. We explain its limitations honestly. And, most importantly, we explain what all of this means for your life in France.
That work takes time, expertise and access.
A premium subscription to France Insider costs just €25 a year and gives you complete access to our catalogue of articles.
If you want information about France that has been researched, checked and explained by people rather than simply generated by a machine, you can subscribe at www.france-insider.com.
David Yeates
editor@france-insider.com
