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NewsNotFound: An open-source, unbiased news company

newsnotfound.com

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Re: NewsNotFound: An open-source, unbiased news company

#21

Post by AiaAidan »

As someone who has worked in the media industry, I can tell you that the problem with unbiased news goes much deeper than simply presenting facts objectively. The very first step mentioned in your breakdown - scraping the latest headlines from publicly available news sites - is inherently biased, because it relies on a small selection of sources to determine what is considered newsworthy. But by whom? In reality, editors play a crucial role in shaping the news by deciding which events to cover and which to ignore, based on their own biases and interests.

From my own experience, I can tell you that the most important news stories are often the ones that go unreported/underreported by most news sites. Unfortunately, there are also many insidious methods used to shape public opinion, such as distraction etc. But it all starts with the decisions made by editors about WHAT YOU, as a reader, should SEE and CARE about. So if we truly want to achieve unbiased news, we need to start by reevaluating the very definition of what is news.

Re: NewsNotFound: An open-source, unbiased news company

#24

Post by JoshuaRedmond »

It seems to me that their view of bias is limited to a per-article approach. This could make it succeptible to broader narrative bias across stories - if, for example, the news sources are selectively only reporting on muggings when perpetrated by one race/nationality/immigration status/gender over another then it'll still give a false impression of attacks by those people, as it'll be completely blind to the lesser-reported cases.

Re: NewsNotFound: An open-source, unbiased news company

#25

Post by osigurdson »

transcriptase wrote: post #18
not2b wrote: post #9

"By replacing the human middle-man with our AI-centric article creation process, we eliminate the potential for bias and ensure that all coverage remains impartial." AI LLMs inherit biases from their training data and the constraints the model builders added. There's no such thing as unbiased reporting; the usual way that this is attempted is to claim that the "unbiased" position is halfway between the positions of t…

The fact that major LLMs will happily criticize certain politicians but claim they’re unable to comment on others given equally available training data is a fairly good window into what kind of biases exist within them.

I’ve always wondered why anyone bothers asking ChatGPT these kinds of questions. Where is the utility?

Re: NewsNotFound: An open-source, unbiased news company

#26

Post by t-3 »

I'd rather a known and well-established bias than the algorithmic illusion of no bias. If I know the bias of my news provider, I can read them critically fairly easily. If I have to guess at the bias, that's much more difficult.

I think a more useful approach would be to aggregate stories from different sources together and summarize the agreed and contested information and viewpoints. That would be a useful tool for evaluating news and identifying propaganda narratives.

Re: NewsNotFound: An open-source, unbiased news company

#27

Post by [deleted] »

newsnotfound wrote: post #2

Imagine you could see into the minds of news reporters - their intentions, thought processes, and emotions when writing articles. This would allow us to hold reporters accountable for bias, misinformation, and sensationalism. Now imagine we could also dictate and control these thought processes and intentions, so as to ensure they aren't aligned with any particular viewpoint or political agenda. Unfortunately, this i…

[deleted]

Re: NewsNotFound: An open-source, unbiased news company

#28

Post by annexrichmond »

It's not hard to discern bias within some article. Having more appropriate headlines is a good step, though.

But I think the bigger issue is more about the coverage of stories. Outlets are certainly going to cater their audience. Example: maybe from sources you see more stories on white-on-black shootings, and in another source you see more black-on-white shootings. So which one is more "newsworthy"? That's where a lot of bias comes into play.

> Step 1: For each category, we begin by scraping the latest headlines from publicly available news sites.

That said, I'd like to know the categories and what sites are scraped, because there may be bias in the selection of such.

Re: NewsNotFound: An open-source, unbiased news company

#29

Post by pessimizer »

> Step 2: Using sentence embedding, we identify any headlines that are related and choose these headlines as the subject of the article. The idea here is that if a story has multiple related headlines across different sources, it is more likely to be of greater importance than a story with none or only one related headline. This helps us determine which story to focus on and write an article about.

Step 2 seems like a process to directly bias the inputs based on the popularity of each outlet. Or rather two processes, one hidden, because the outlets aren't selecting themselves. Why wouldn't this just be a wire service and press release detector?

Re: NewsNotFound: An open-source, unbiased news company

#30

Post by guywithahat »

shortformblog wrote: post #12
newsnotfound wrote: post #2

Imagine you could see into the minds of news reporters - their intentions, thought processes, and emotions when writing articles. This would allow us to hold reporters accountable for bias, misinformation, and sensationalism. Now imagine we could also dictate and control these thought processes and intentions, so as to ensure they aren't aligned with any particular viewpoint or political agenda. Unfortunately, this i…

This idea punches down. Journalists work so hard to complete the work they do. They do not need this. And as noted elsewhere, AI is not inherently unbiased. In fact, one of the big problems with AI is that it introduces systemic bias, and understanding the role of fairness is very important here. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22916602/ai-bias-fairness... I would also raise the point that journalism is actually m…

This doesn’t replace journalists, it’s just an AI driven link aggregator.

That said as others have mentioned, LLVM’s are inherently biased through their training and this site only picks from moderate and left wing sites, bringing into question whether it could ever be unbiased.

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