Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s

The paid version has had web access for at least a year

March 23rd 2023

https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-plugins/

That’s 666 days.

So you are off by over “one order of magnitude”

I don't have a baseline (though can think of a few places I might look...)[1], but I do have some recent data based on a project I've been working on.

There's a simplified page for CNN news at https://lite.cnn.com>.

I've found that frustrating as all the stories are jumbled together with little rhyme or reason (though they seem to be roughly date-ordered).

Ironically, the story URLs themselves include both date and news-section coding, as with:

  https://lite.cnn.com/2024/12/28/us/patrick-thomas-egan-accused-tv-reporter-attack/index.html

That's a US story dated 2024-12-28.

It's possible to extract these and write a restructured page grouped by subject, which I've recently done. One work product is an archive of downloaded front-page views, which I've collected over about the past 5 days. Extracting unique news URLs from that and counting by classification we get a sense of what CNN considers "news":

  Stories: 486
  Sections: 27

    76 (15.64%)  US News
    67 (13.79%)  US Politics
     9  (1.85%)  World
     8  (1.65%)  World -- Americas
     6  (1.23%)  World -- Africa
    15  (3.09%)  World -- Asia
     4  (0.82%)  World -- Australia
     5  (1.03%)  World -- China
     2  (0.41%)  World -- India
    37  (7.61%)  World -- Europe
    21  (4.32%)  World -- MidEast
     2  (0.41%)  World -- UK
     8  (1.65%)  Economy
    45  (9.26%)  Business
     4  (0.82%)  Tech
     3  (0.62%)  Investing
     8  (1.65%)  Media
     8  (1.65%)  Science
     7  (1.44%)  Weather
     4  (0.82%)  Climate
    22  (4.53%)  Health
     2  (0.41%)  Food
     1  (0.21%)  Homes
    39  (8.02%)  Entertainment
    52 (10.70%)  Sport
    22  (4.53%)  Travel
     9  (1.85%)  Style

The ordering here is how I display sections within the rendered page, by my own assigned significance.

One element which had inspired this was that so much of CNN's "news" seemed entertainment-related. That's not just "Entertainment", but also much of Health, Food, Homes, Sport, Travel, and Style, which are collectively 147 of 486 stories, or about 1/3 of the total.

Further, much if not most of the "US-News" category is ... relatively mundane crime coverage. It's attention-grabbing, but not particularly significant. Stories in other sections (politics, business, investing, media) can also be markedly trivial.

Ballparking half of US news as non-trivial crime, at best about 60% of the headlines are what I'd consider to be actual journalistic news, and probably less than that.

On the one hand, I now have a tool which gives me a far more organised view of CNN headlines. On the other ... the actual content isn't especially significant.

I'm looking at similar tools for other news sites, though I'm limited to those which will serve JS-free content. Many sites have exceedingly complex page layouts, and some (e.g., the Financial Times don't encode date or section clearly in the story URLs themselves, e.g.:

  https://www.ft.com/content/d85f3f2d-9e9d-4d92-a851-64480e56a248

That's a presently current story "Putin apologises to Azerbaijan for Kazakhstan air crash", classified as "Aviation accidents and safety".

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Notes:

1. For those interested, most readily accessed and parsed, the Vanderbilt TV News Archive (https://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/>), which has rundowns of US natinoal news beginning 5 August 1968, to present (ABC, CBS, and NBC from inception, with CNN since 1995 and Fox News since 2004). It's not the most rigorous archive, but it's one that could probably be analysed more reasonably than others.

I'm not sure that's true. I think that media has always had some inevitable inaccuracy, but it's only been in the past 20-30 years that people have had enough information to see that inaccuracy. Back when there were a dozen newspapers on the newsstand and 3 TV channels, there simply wasn't anywhere to see any information outside the mainstream media. This wasn't necessarily malicious or intentional; it was simply a reflection of culture and the type of people who worked in newsrooms. With the invention of the Internet anyone could easily find alternative sources of information. Sometimes those sources were more accurate than the mainstream, sometimes less. Nowadays there isn't a "mainstream" of media because there's so many sources, and the group labelled as "the mainstream media" is simply a group with similar biases.

Or to put it another way, the media's accuracy rate has stayed consistent at some value less than 100%, but if all three TV channels reported the same information then it looked like they had 100% accuracy. Once there were more sources of information then it became apparent that the media's accuracy was less than 100% despite their protests to the contrary.

The result is that the media landscape is fractured. A person can live in a bubble where all of their news sources (eg NYT, WaPo, and Bluesky for one bubble; Fox, Newsmax, and Truth Social for another bubble) all report the same information, making their accuracy appear to be 100%, while any single source of information outside the bubble that disagrees with the bubble is disagreeing with a bunch of apparently 100% accurate sources and so can safely be discarded.

The solution is to realize that no source is 100% accurate or unbiased even despite genuine efforts to be. That isn't to say that some sources aren't more accurate or unbiased than others, but you should apply some base level of skepticism to any and every source

Fun take

Disconcerting take

I like the narrative aspect of it

It could be better and different - trust. Being critical is not the same thing as not trusting anyone at all. Media has by and large become not worthy of trusting at all. There are exceptions, but they are few and far between.

The economics of just giving the news with little bias just aren't there anymore.