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You did no fact checking, and I must scream

shkspr.mobi

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Re: You did no fact checking, and I must scream

#31

Post by prerok »

dragontamer wrote: post #23
mananaysiempre wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A decent newspaper can afford this because it also has a fact checker, a copyeditor, a line editor, and an expectation that a journalist will be fired[1] if they systematically fuck up the substance of their writing. It’s difficult to find a decent newspaper. [1] Or otherwise not employed—newspapers perfected not treating their core workforce as employees decades before everyone else.

A decent newspaper today in 2025 writes slop for their website to ensure daily engagement with their readers. To the point that people are talking about AI articles, literally serving slop. Maybe they have a few AP articles thrown in there. We have to acknowledge what has changed in our world and why things are the way that they are. Perhaps daily news is simply not profitable enough to provide us with quality inform…

Did you mean it was decent in the past?

I think the GP's statement was that there are almost no decent newspapers anymore, which I think nobody would disagree with.

Re: You did no fact checking, and I must scream

#32

Post by travisgriggs »

> The media have comprehensively failed us.

Good. The author didn’t make the mistake of calling it the “news”.

I have for a long time felt that there is nuance about our “press” that doesn’t have good words in the public dialog. I struggle to articulate it myself.

Our modern “free press” is only free in that government is mostly not censoring it. But the press of today is a for profit endeavour. So it is not free to waste time “speaking truth” or something like that. It is incentivized to be whatever it takes to grab and keep eyeballs.

While there are people/institutions who publish things purely for information they feel is important, this is largely drowned out by the “trying to make money” crowd.

So our supposedly “free press”, while possibly free of despotic controls, is still a slave to the feedback loop of economics. Very much unfree. A sort of irony.

Re: You did no fact checking, and I must scream

#33

Post by ecshafer »

rafterydj wrote: post #2

Just yesterday, there was a post that made me angry in the same vein: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45609942 Not only was the article slop, but the author kept responding to comments/criticisms with MORE slop. I must scream.

I am not one to jump on the "This is AI" train. But the "author" responding is absolutely AI, I would bet vast sums of money on it. It reads exactly like chatgpt.

Re: You did no fact checking, and I must scream

#34

Post by alexpotato »

Yuval Noah Harari has a great quote (paraphrased) about slop/fake news etc:

   People always ask how we will deal with AI generated fake images and news etc. My answer is the way we have always done it: by creating institutions to deliver accurate information
I like this quote for two reasons:

1. In other words, people paid good money to the New York Times or the Atlantic b/c they had excellent fact checking departments. You could argue people did this for business reasons with the WSJ or Financial Times too. They still do it with Bloomberg terminals.

2. My grandfather made a Christmas card back in the 1950s showing the whole family shrunk down and on various parts of the mantle above the fireplace. He did this using photoshop (as in the skill not the software) and it looked fantastic. I highlight this b/c "slop" has been around a long time.

Re: You did no fact checking, and I must scream

#35

Post by MountDoom »

> I hope I've demonstrated that it takes almost no effort to perform a basic fact check. It isn't a professional skill.

First, it takes effort when you're paid a pittance per every article you crank out. The reality is that a lot of newspapers now operate more as content farms (publish a lot of stuff as quickly as possible) than as outlets for investigative journalism.

In fact, for a lot of these clikbaity stories, you could cynically say that the truth just doesn't matter. "Research shows that the kitten was never stranded in the storm drain in the first place." OK, so? How were you harmed by an untruth? Why did you click in the first place?... I can get angry at being lied to on principle, but maybe there's some soul-searching I should do.

Further, we don't actually fact-check the vast majority of what we take to be true. When you're dunking on people for not fact-checking, you're essentially just saying "the things you accept as true differ slightly from the things I accept as true". You're probably not better than that gullible journalist. You just happened to know a bit more about this topic, or had some other arbitrary / subjective reason to investigate this particular thing.

Re: You did no fact checking, and I must scream

#36

Post by jimmydddd »

altcognito wrote: post #18

I'm confused why we are fact checking viral slop. First, you would have to confirm she wrote it. When and where was it published. If you can't confirm that, you shouldn't post it. Stop, go no further. What if the information was plausible, or even accurate. If she didn't write it, what value is it?

Agreed. It seems like a supposed quote? If my elderly mom wrote that she went to a NY Mets baseball game in 1960, and Wikipedia says the Mets weren't formed until 1962, is a newspaper supposed to determine that the quote is not legit bacause my mom mis-wrote or was confused?

Re: You did no fact checking, and I must scream

#39

Post by dfxm12 »

Apreche wrote: post #10

> I hope I've demonstrated that it takes almost no effort to perform a basic fact check. It isn't a professional skill. For myself a quick fact check like this is also low effort. Unlike the author, I recognize this is a professional skill. We are fortunate enough to be incredibly proficient in a large set of skills. Language, literacy, reading quickly, tech skills, research, touch-typing, critical thinking, searchin…

You need to be curious to fact check. Anyone can be curious. This is different from "being tall".

OK, if you're reading an (alleged) interview with an actress where she, a nonagenarian talks about her 40s, but it turns out she was in her 30s, gasp.

However, if someone in the news section, keeps calling several US cities a warzone, over and over again, with no evidence, ehh, the hardest part about fact checking this is overcoming any personal biases or prejudices you might have.

Re: You did no fact checking, and I must scream

#40

Post by AtlasBarfed »

the__alchemist wrote: post #30

I hope not to derail, as the core of the author's point is valid and important for people to understand. Isn't this a bit like saying "The compulsive liar lied! He should stop doing that." Or "The propaganda agency is posting propaganda; they should stop doing that". Focusing on details like this is assuming good faith, or assuming that the problems pointed out are exceptions, when they are the rule.

The other interesting thing about the article is just that the entire nature of fact checking, references and cross references, especially over time, requires physical documents.

References to electronically stored documents are about as ephemeral as it gets. And certainly the wayback machine which I would guess is running on donations and largesse, isn't going to cut it for document archival purposes.

It's ironic that we're entering an era where we can store massive amounts of scanned media on a scale we can hardly fathom with modern hard drive density technologies, and yet linking and referencing of that data over a substantive time frame is effectively impossible currently.

Combined with the loss in a sea of what used to just be noise but now is increasingly mendacious/ manipulative/ weaponized noise... And it feels like history itself is being consumed by a cacophony of data noise from the internet

I had this idea of a document DNS at one point when I was working on some records management system at a company, so that various important control documents could reference each other without being system, dependent, vendor dependent etc.

I suppose that is just DNS at some level, although it's probably much too granular for actual DNS servers.

It would provide a mechanism to audit and validate that a document is still properly electronically linked.

I have no idea how you do that one. Even the core domain names shift constantly due to corporate acquisitions and the like.

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