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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

#51

Post by osigurdson »

bmelton wrote: post #34
osigurdson wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A lot of these discoveries were being made when OpenAI and ChatGPT were pretty new to the general public. Nobody knew what it did, so these kinds of questions were no different than any questions being asked, basically. That so deep a bias was discovered so quickly was likely incredibly surprising to some, and incredibly unsurprising to others, but they were asked for the same reason as others - to find out what it d…

I suppose. I remember my first encounters with the Open AI playground were along the lines of "write a short story about X". Amusing at first but the novelty quickly wears off.

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

#52

Post by methou »

When enjoying good and insightful articles, I always assume that biases are deeply ingrained before an article was written. Author's educational background and affiliation plays a large role in how they write. Some of the biases are easy to spot and we can just laugh it out, but some of these are also unconscious bias. I would more likely to have an "AI" that identifies biases by analyzing the history of the authors, agencies, and related historical articles. It seems impossible to me as this is very aggressive on people who are working in the industry and a disrespect of their personhood.

On the other hand, knowing what's happening in the world in a few sentenses is another thing, having GPT to check the bias and do some cross-ref checks is really sweet, after all I don't really care about most of the news.

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

#54

Post by iudqnolq »

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…

> In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.

> “What are you doing?”, asked Minsky.

> “I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe” Sussman replied.

> “Why is the net wired randomly?”, asked Minsky.

> “I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play”, Sussman said.

> Minsky then shut his eyes.

> “Why do you close your eyes?”, Sussman asked his teacher.

> “So that the room will be empty.”

> At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/koans.html

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

#55

Post by DangitBobby »

I really like the idea! I don't even mind that it hallucinates a little bit since I remember probably 10% of what I read and I'll read multiple sources for things that matter to me anyway. As for everyone commenting on bias: we all know there's no such thing as 0 bias.

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

#56

Post by flangola7 »

altairprime wrote: post #7

> The headline should use completely neutral and unbiased language. Aim to be factual, not opinionated. This sounds incredibly dull and lifeless. If you’re writing an encyclopedia, it’s fine. If you’re looking to be acquihired by Bloomberg Wire, it’s fine. But, modern chatbot aren’t capable of adhering to the restriction “factual”, and will hallucinate information just as readily as a human witness might during an in…

"Neutral" language isn't even necessarily unbiased. "Leader of Nazi Germany Adolf Hitler committed horrible and evil actions" isn't "neutral" but it is a statement of clear objective fact.

It's the same reason why passive voice writing such as "police-involved shooting" are problematic and biased.

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

#57

Post by arcanemachiner »

osigurdson wrote: post #25
transcriptase wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Maybe I'm having a bad day and I just need to hear a rap song about how cool Donald Trump is, to help boost my mood.

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

#58

Post by langsoul-com »

The problem isn't the news sources. It's the incentives. A lot of those big media that people view as untrustworthy today were really good back then.

But, eyeballs and ads result in emotional content and stories. Subscriptions means targeting a niche and always sticking with them, truth be dammed.

Watch Netflix, their ads and subs business earns more than pure subscriptions. So now their incentives are you as a product, not good content.

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

#59

Post by paulddraper »

numbsafari wrote: post #32
AiaAidan wrote: post #21

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, edi…

There is no such thing as unbiased news. Anyone claiming to be unbiased, rather than wearing their biases on their sleeves, is lying to you, or themselves, or they are just ignorant. Likely some combination of all three.

Selection bias is insidious, and impossible to rid.

By definition, news is things that are newsworthy. I.e. the most common things to tech receive coverage are the uncommon to things.

If four people get shot over the weekend in Riverdale, not news. If four people get shot over the weekend in Beverly Hills, news.

You don't even have to try to bias news for it be biased. (Now imagine if you try.)

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