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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

#91

Post by KaiserPro »

endorphine wrote: post #74
KaiserPro wrote: post #73

Reading the articles, you end up with vague sentences that are disjointed. Take this example: https://newsnotfound.com/new-seafood-and-italianinfluenced-r... this is a PR piece from a local news site. There is no critical thought as to why this is in the news. Not only is this not news, but it contains about 4 facts. The rest is vague useless information. If you want good quality news, you need to pay for it, from mu…

Perhaps some human moderation as to which articles finally make it to the site would solve this?

That would be editorial.

But it needs more than that, GPT isn't very good a summarisation. None of these summaries are useful, and there is nothing stopping someone filling it with bias.

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

#92

Post by mynameishere »

echelon wrote: post #89
strogonoff wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to think that unbiased news is an intractable problem purely based on information theory: to have an unbiased picture of the world, you need to have all the facts, which is physically impossible; and any layer that simplifies those facts (be it a journalist or an LLM) will add bias (either by journalist, journalist’s employer, LLM’s training data or operator preferences, and so on). In short, when your selecti…

Unbiased news algorithm: 1. Identify all clusters of power and opinion, eg. Republicans, Democrats, Chinese Communist Party, UK Labour Party, Green Party, etc. 2. Associate each cluster with news organizations that tightly align with their policies. 3. Evaluate stories - headlines in only one cluster (under reported elsewhere) represent a view. Headlines that have different takes, likewise, give you a spectrum of tho…

Your "etc" includes some very powerful ethnic groups. Are you planning on "identifying" them?

I didn't think so.

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

#93

Post by echelon »

mynameishere wrote: post #92
echelon wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unbiased news algorithm: 1. Identify all clusters of power and opinion, eg. Republicans, Democrats, Chinese Communist Party, UK Labour Party, Green Party, etc. 2. Associate each cluster with news organizations that tightly align with their policies. 3. Evaluate stories - headlines in only one cluster (under reported elsewhere) represent a view. Headlines that have different takes, likewise, give you a spectrum of tho…

Your "etc" includes some very powerful ethnic groups. Are you planning on "identifying" them? I didn't think so.

I don't see why you can't. Throw religion in while you're at it. Even interest groups around other classes: disability, socioeconomic, etc.

You can absolutely say a newspaper (or individual columnist or editor) is pro-LGBT, pro-Israel, pro-Palestine, pro-Mormon, pro-Amish, pro-Atheist, etc. That shouldn't be controversial. Wikipedia can and does do this in a relatively neutral way.

If your classification is meant to disparage a group, then I'd see the trouble. Don't do that.

I want an up to date, well rounded view of how everyone sees the world. A system capable of getting me to see geopolitical events in other perspectives is useful, even if I ultimately choose to uphold my existing beliefs.

FWIW, I subscribe to all sorts of diverse political view subreddits and Twitter handles. Unfortunately, it's still hardly comprehensive is a lot of work to analyze and distill.

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

#94

Post by joelegner »

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.

Isn’t the aspiration to be unbiased worthy already?

The goal or call it “aspiration” to serve unbiased news is admirable to me, even while my rational mind knows the aspiration is an unattainable ideal. I will give them a try. Then I can judge their sincerity and performance relative to their aspiration.

Edit: added “judge”

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

#95

Post by numbsafari »

joelegner wrote: post #94
numbsafari wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn’t the aspiration to be unbiased worthy already? The goal or call it “aspiration” to serve unbiased news is admirable to me, even while my rational mind knows the aspiration is an unattainable ideal. I will give them a try. Then I can judge their sincerity and performance relative to their aspiration. Edit: added “judge”

How can you judge the relative distance from a fiction?

Who defines what is “unbiased”? What are their biases?

You cannot measure something that exists in a fiction that resides independently in each person’s mind.

Objective reality exists, but objective observers do not.

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

#96

Post by RobotToaster »

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.

This is why I prefer to read openly bias sources.

If you read sources bias in both directions, you at least know the truth is probably somewhere within that range.

Granted that range can be quite large at times.

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

#97

Post by blackbear_ »

strogonoff wrote: post #88
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…

I used to think that unbiased news is an intractable problem purely based on information theory: to have an unbiased picture of the world, you need to have all the facts, which is physically impossible; and any layer that simplifies those facts (be it a journalist or an LLM) will add bias (either by journalist, journalist’s employer, LLM’s training data or operator preferences, and so on). In short, when your selecti…

Technically speaking, if every day you take an uniformly random selection of news articles, on average what you read will not be biased. Or, to be precise, it will follow the same biases as the population of news articles you sample from.

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

#99

Post by revelio »

numbsafari wrote: post #95
joelegner wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t the aspiration to be unbiased worthy already? The goal or call it “aspiration” to serve unbiased news is admirable to me, even while my rational mind knows the aspiration is an unattainable ideal. I will give them a try. Then I can judge their sincerity and performance relative to their aspiration. Edit: added “judge”

How can you judge the relative distance from a fiction? Who defines what is “unbiased”? What are their biases? You cannot measure something that exists in a fiction that resides independently in each person’s mind. Objective reality exists, but objective observers do not.

So you don't Believe In Science, friend? ;)

Objective observation is really hard, but amenable to systems and rules that help get closer to this ideal. I'm convinced it's possible to do far better than existing news organisations do just through approaching it with an engineering mindset.

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

#100

Post by revelio »

williamtrask wrote: post #13
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…

This ideology of “replace corrupt institutions with tech” is at the center of SV ideology going back to the 70s. It’s as flawed then as it is now, but it occasionally has wins. There’s a great documentary on the long history of this idea in tech, both wins and losses, called “all watched over by machines of loving grace”. Brilliant documentary.

It has some big and pretty frequent wins in that department compared to any other culture or industry.
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