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chimmercritter t1_j1rszl3 wrote

Reply to comment by 4e_65_6f in I created an AI to replace Fox and CNN by redditguyjustinp

He's a professor who wrote Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, he also founded the Future of Life institute https://futureoflife.org/person/max-tegmark/ He's not sorting the news, his team trained an algorithm to find the news in common between sources from many different biases and report the commonalities

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4e_65_6f t1_j1rw0lg wrote

>his team trained an algorithm to find the news in common between sources from many different biases and report the commonalities

The problem with many news sources have nowadays, in the effort to be impartial then end up elevating opinions that aren't supposed to even be considered. Making it seem like everything is a 50/50 debate when only one of the sides has actual arguments.

Think for instance the problem of climate change, instead of debating measures for preventing climate change (because it's already consensus it's real) they keep bringing on people who deny climate change, even though it's 1/1000 scientists that will do that, in the news it's a 1vs1 debate so to the audience it looks like the issue is not yet settled.

Any algorithm that seeks to find commonalities between all news sources will end up considering points of view which are not valid as if they were. Because the news themselves are like that.

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AndromedaAnimated t1_j1rymns wrote

Considering climate change, have you already read about our dear chatGPT not „wanting“ to discuss advantages of fossil fuels anymore?

By the way, the current debate on this topic is only 50/50 because there is financial funding (lobbies) behind the fossil fuels. This means even if every single REAL scientific source says human-driven climate change exists, someone will pay someone to present an opposing view, and once that one is discredited, there will be another paid someone who will present it… and so on.

During my time at university we were joking about „sexy data“ at our institute - data that will be interesting for big corporations and bring funding for further research as well as sensationalist results that will get into print with a higher probability and raise the author‘s status in academia again leading to more funding…

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4e_65_6f t1_j1s2b8m wrote

Yes, besides bias there's legitimate greedy people with bad intentions throwing money where it shouldn't go behind the scenes. They also fund scientific research.

It's naive to think AI can sort through that mess with any reliability.

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AndromedaAnimated t1_j1s39ck wrote

Politics plays an important role too (and greedy politicians). Best example for this was the criminalisation of marihuana use, with a fake assessment it was based on.

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TenshiS t1_j1tid96 wrote

So you're advocating for biased news on topics which have reached consensus in the scientific community?

I think it's healthier to say "this is what the consensus in the scientific community is, and this is what someone else says" and let the reader decide.

Don't make me use Galileo as an example on expert consensus

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4e_65_6f t1_j1u4io0 wrote

I'm not advocating for it I just think it is impossible to have non biased news. It's even more impossible IMO to try filtering the news and find a non biased perspectives by finding commonalities and statistical averages between all biased news.

Whenever you think "Oh this news source isn't biased" it's because they have the same bias as you do. So we don't see it.

The example you gave about Galileo would require the "news sorting bot" to understand the science so thoroughly that it would be able to realize when a scientist is speaking the truth and being ridiculed by it. But at that point it would be AGI already and humans probably wouldn't be the ones doing the research anymore.

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TenshiS t1_j1udg2v wrote

That's why I said it's healthier to avoid selling something as non-biased but still show multiple perspectives and their context. It's the best we've got

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