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Human news isn't a good comparison because this is second order -- LMMs are downstream of human news. It's a game of stochastic telephone. All the human error is carried through with additional hallucinations on top.

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But the issue is that the vast majority of "human news" is second order (at best), essentially paraphrasing releases by news agencies like Reuters or Associated Press, or scientific articles, and typically doing a horrible job at it.

Regarding scientific reporting, there's as usual a relevant xkcd ("New Study") [0], and in this case even better, there's a fabulous one from PhD Comics ("Science News Cycle") [1].

[0] https://xkcd.com/1295/

[1] https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174

Then the point still stands, this makes things even worse given that it's adding its own hallucinations on top, instead of simply relaying the content or idealistically, identifying issues in the reporting.

You understand that an LLM can only poorly regurgitate whatever it’s fed right? An LLM will _always_ be less useful than a primary/secondary source, because they can’t fucking think.

Regardless of how you define "think", you still need to get a baseline of whether human reporters do that effectively.

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