Alana Goodman writes for the Washington Free Beacon about a disturbing fact involving artificial intelligence.
Al Jazeera, the virulently anti-Israel news outlet controlled by Qatar, is one of the two top sources used by leading artificial intelligence chatbots—OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Perplexity AI—to answer questions and write news summaries about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a Washington Free Beacon analysis has found.
ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity—as well as X’s Grok—list Al Jazeera as one of their most reliable sources on the topic. In response to queries from the Free Beacon, the chatbots praised Al Jazeera for its reliability, “on-the-ground detail,” “academic credibility,” and “global visibility.”
Indeed, ChatGPT, the world’s leading AI chatbot, said that in the past month it cited Al Jazeera more frequently on the topic than almost any other news source, including the New York Times and the Associated Press. Gemini, for one, says it specifically does not use pro-Israel news sources, because they engage in “hasbara,” the Hebrew word for public relations and advocacy, “rather than journalism.” Perplexity, which reportedly boasts 22 million users, says its top sources for news on the Middle East are “respected outlets with strong regional reporting and editorial standards.” The first is Al Jazeera.
The ubiquity of Al Jazeera as a primary source for AI-generated news searches raises questions about the capacity (or willingness) of American AI giants to deliver accurate news about Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. This comes as AI-generated summaries are increasingly replacing traditional news publications as a primary source for news.
Since the early to mid-2000s, when it was al Qaeda’s go-to destination for taped messages from the world’s most wanted terrorists, as well as for hostage and beheading videos, Al Jazeera has earned bipartisan criticism for being a “state-controlled propaganda arm” that Qatar has used to “incite violence, glorify terrorist killers as ‘martyrs,’ and broadcast hateful, extremist content.”
