NewsNotFound: An open-source, unbiased news company
newsnotfound.com
newsnotfound.com
From my own experience, I can tell you that the most important news stories are often the ones that go unreported/underreported by most news sites. Unfortunately, there are also many insidious methods used to shape public opinion, such as distraction etc. But it all starts with the decisions made by editors about WHAT YOU, as a reader, should SEE and CARE about. So if we truly want to achieve unbiased news, we need to start by reevaluating the very definition of what is 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.
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.)
Underreporting on violence in certain communities vs others is biased. Who determines what is uncommon vs common? Who decides the value of 4 people in Riverdale vs 4 people in Beverly Hills? Just going by “frequency of shootings” is a form of bias.
We can get within a few fractions of a percent of absolute zero but we can't sensibly agree on what "unbiased" even looks like.
You would still have to pose the right questions or risk dying in ignorance.
People's complaints here about bias is really about being manipulated successfully by parts of society working actively in their own, markedly different, interests.
Those won't just go away. Aligning interests doesn't happen by providing facts.
I realise now that my messaging with this project is off.
What would more accurately explain the purpose of this project is to reduce the effects of sensationalism and indoctrination in the news.
In other words, provide a platform for readers to make up their own opinions on news stories by filtering out the excessive positive/negative language.
Even if NewsNotFound articles are only 90% neutral, that's 90% BETTER than reading the same story from a sensationalist source.
Humans provide their sentiment about developments to further their individual interests. Other people want to be informed about those motivations. Taking that away makes news subjectively meaningless for most.
There is a minority of truth-seekers who essentially individually engage in OSINT activity (if only by consuming more than one source).
An AI "doing the thinking for them" isn't the right way though (trust is an issue, remember). You want to teach people, how to be an intelligence analyst and give them the tools to avoid the drudgery.
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”
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.
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.
To be even 90% unbiased is 90% better than a sensationalist source.
I'm sure we can get very close to 100% as LLMs progress and if more talented people contribute to the project.
There is no way to judge whether or not you are close to some objective view of “unbiased news”. So it is not a worthwhile pursuit.
As others have noted, what is “newsworthy” is an entirely subjective prioritization of events and information. Are four deaths in Riverside news? Are four deaths in Palm Springs? Are both? Are neither? It depends on your subjective priorities, as a consumer, and no single news organization is ever going to achieve universal, subjective, but somehow unbiased news prioritization.
Labeling anyone person or group’s prioritization of information as “truth” is a dubious endeavor. Dubious to the point of being laughable.
Back to the topic: we seem to be talking about a human being choosing between competing news sources. As that consumer, you get to define "unbiased" for yourself. Wise people have given it a lot of thought, so you might consider consulting what they said.
And you can draw the line at something being measurable to matter to you. That's your choice. I have found the things that matter most are fictions in my brain: love comes to mind.
It is also not necessary to measure to detect a distance. I love my dog, and I love my child. I cannot measure love, yet I detect a significant distance between my love for my dog and my love for my child.
Like love, "bias" has meaning even if it cannot be measured. Like love, one can detect distances between biases, even if they cannot be measured. Science (measurement), math (quantity), and logic (relations of ideas) are just as ephemeral, because they are founded upon unprovable axioms and norms.
I'd love to hear your thoughts after giving the site a try (please use the contact page on the website).
It is by no means perfect right now, but the goal is to get as close to perfect as possible.
Even if NewsNotFound articles are only 90% neutral right now, that's 90% BETTER than reading the same story from a sensationalist source.
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.
What would more accurately explain the purpose of this project is to reduce the effects of sensationalism and indoctrination in the news.
In other words, provide a platform for readers to make up their own opinions on news stories by filtering out the positive/negative language.
Even if NewsNotFound articles are only 90% neutral, that's 90% BETTER than reading the same story from a sensationalist source.
Also, filtering out the positive and negative language might hide the bias of the article, making it seem more authoritative and believable. Many times when I read an article, and I see the journalist making conclusions with bombastic and unbalanced language, it is helpful information toward allowing me to detect bullshit and avoid that source.
1. Information that immediately affects me
2. Information that might affect me
3. Information that doesn't affect me but I still care to know
4. Information that won't affect me
5. Information that won't affect me and I don't care to know
6. Information I don't care to know even if it affects me
Surely there must be a way to monetize information delivery. I would pay for an editorial-less stream of information that is relevant to me, and that isn't that I still want to know.
I removed all other news apps from my phone and only leave the Reuters news app installed. [1]
I never read the news anymore.
The combination of the uncurated deluge of articles about stuff I don't know anything about (and realize I am not going to ever really know anything about) and them not really poking my buttons with editorialized headlines makes me just ignore it and come here more often instead.
Edit: I fathom its because the Reuters business model is fundamentally different - they are just trying to supply as many articles for use as raw base material factoids to all types of media organizations who can then add their own "secret sauce/value" by curating which articles their audience "sees" and handle the "interpretation" of the factoids (i.e. insert the editorial opinion with headlines, quips for their audiences will appreciate). That said - I do recall reading about some instances that Reuters is not perfect (article rushed to press and not entirely factually correct).
Maybe for American news it is unbiased across conservatives / liberals, however from a non-American point of view Reuters is very VERY much biased towards US / CIA (even though it is incorporated in England).
Human communication has the aspects of content, sentiment and style. People look at style first, as they take it as an indicator for the social standing of the speaker. Sentiment is a close second, as it tells you about the attitude that speaker has towards the reported events. Content lastly is just the events themselves as they (reportedly) happened.
People find that content part hard to follow on its own, mostly because they usually don't really know the context anyway. Focusing on it as supposedly important "unbiased" "true" news is a gross misunderstanding.
Like yourself, people generally have a very incomplete idea of the world they live in. Like you, they don't seem to take much interest in it, as they view it as "not relevant to their lives". That is an absurd statement to make, if one has no clue about that part of the world to begin with, like you observed.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-media-idUSKBN1ZC2...
Makes you wonder what the as yet to be declassified top secret documents say.
The secret government financing of Reuters - as set out in the documents - amounted to 245,000 pounds ($317,838 at current exchange rates) per year before 1969 but then reduced to 100,000 pounds per year in 1969-1970 and nothing in 1972-1973.”
I don’t grasp what the article’s writer meant by “current exchange rates” and “before 1969” here, but in any event it sounds like only a few million real constant 2023 dollar equivalents, total, were involved, which is less like a secret think tank and more like travel and bureau support, which is basically what is being admitted to.
As seen recently when Fox buried the story of their defamation case.
However, I realized that’s not really true.
I mean, of course you cannot have unbiased news, and reevaluating the definition of “news” is not going to help you.
It’s just that there is actually a very good mechanism for combatting this—and it’s called “be aware of your bias and upfront about it”. There is any other way around it.
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 thought on an issue or topic.
4. Collect fine points and build a report. Bonus for providing contrasting opinions and associating them with the party/power responsible for that thinking.
I want this tool. It'd be okay if it wasn't perfect. Just getting 80% of the way there would be incredibly valuable. I'd pay for it.
I didn't think so.
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.
I.e. Christians (as an averaged whole) can look at the same situation as a blank slate and have a statistically significant and consistently different perspective
As can scientists. As can maybe microbiologists and industrial chemists.
The point of the clustering isn't that the tags are pejorative, but that they're predictive metadata on any source's bias.
And often times that's currently unexposed. I see a post by echelon, but only by the content of that single post (and maybe some prior HN contact) can I reconstruct his typical perspectives.
Your "to be precise" sentence states directly that what you read WILL be biased.
Furthermore, the intent of parent's bias averaging, as I understand it, is...
1) There are a finite number of major biases axes in mass media (e.g. political parties, wealthy-poor, conservative-liberal, etc.), ergo averaging these out is a helpful reduction of major biases
2) It assumes the underlying material has a bias, and seeks to counteract it. If you build a fact-based method, you leave yourself open to treating biased opinions as facts, if they're sufficiently masked
I don’t know if it is clear but I really meant it that unbiased news is not a possibility due to fundamental limitations of information theory and finiteness of individual information processing capabilities; self-awareness and bias transparency is the only way.
> helpful reduction of major biases
Only if those major biases are opposite between media.
Imagine biases as vectors pointing in arbitrary directions. Best case is when bias vector in one cluster is compensated by exactly opposite bias vector in another cluster, but how often do you expect that to happen? A more typical scenario is a vector pointing in merely a different, rather than opposite, direction. A worst-case scenario, and also common (because bias manifests itself in selection if facts to report, and most sources report on the same events), is when all bias vectors point in a similar direction.
As for averaging out, yes, the vector model was what I was using internally.
Disclosure: I'm US-based, so our politics are traditionally bipolar as a result of our election system (in contrast to Europe et al.).
I would be surprised if vectors don't cancel often though, because think what we're really talking about in a capitalist information space: popular perspectives that are profitably marketable.
What is the easiest way to find an audience? Do what your competitors are not.
So on the whole, high revenue and production cost media (tv, web) in a capitalist information space will converge into bipolar pairs on any given issue, in order to maximize market share.
In lower cost media or operations, it will more likely be a random scattering of vectors.
There's a whole lot of bias that's "baked in" with US politics / media. There's broad consensus on neoliberal capitalism, personal freedoms vs collectivism, common ground on opposing states like Russia and China.
On a few wedge issues you will average out to a common ground, but ultimately you're not eliminating bias, you're just eliminating a relatively small bias between left-wing and right-wing US and replacing it with an "overall US" bias.
As for whether averaging that out is useful...?
I'd be happy to have news from a "overall US" bias, without the right/left political spin.
Corollary: since this awareness of the bias requires self-honesty and introspection, it’s drastically more difficult with an LLM because you also need to know all about your LLM developer and operator’s accidental and intentional biases.
For example, one way in theory is to scrape all known publicly available news sites and create an article for every single detected story, but this would be very expensive.
As someone with experience in the media, what steps would you take to find these under-reported stories? Maybe the steps can be replicated with AI to increase coverage?
twitter and reddit do a pretty good job publicizing it though
But there is no such thing as a pure fact, innocent of interpretation. Behind every fact presented to the world—by a teacher, a writer, anyone—is a judgment. The judgment that has been made is that this fact is important, and that other facts, omitted, are not important.
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 the two dominant political parties in some country, which might look like intense bias to someone in another country.
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.
If you want to focus purely on governmental institutions then encryption put intel agencies / corrupt police on the back foot and the digitization of processes especially payments has killed off a lot of low level corruption.
What other industry has such a record?
A news site saying "we eliminate the potential for bias" is like an airline saying "we eliminate the potential for accidents". It's a massive red flag and should warn you to stay far away. Bias can be controlled, but never eliminated, and anyone who thinks they've gotten rid of it is either lying or hopelessly naive.
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 does and whether it could be seen as reliable for a source of information
Is it "I can't say that about X because I am told not to say things like that about X"?
or is it "I can't say that about X because I am told not to encourage behaviour Y and my training data indicates that comments like that about X lead to behaviour Y"?
> “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.
Doesn't really sound like a news company to me.
Also, while I'm on the topic, "unbiased" news is an anti-pattern. A big part of the value of reporters is synthesizing and contextualizing events. Wikipedia current events[1] is basically unbiased news, but it has a tiny audience (and is still dependent on linking out to actual news organizations).
So I'm most suspicious of sources that brag about their objectivity. I prefer sources that wear their bias on their sleeve (provided they're actually news sources, and not overt propaganda or gutter tabloids).
Seriously, the bar is not exactly high. Start with telling me where and when something happen, make a time line if it's a series of events. Tell me who is involved. Don't dress it in flowery language, make it as simple as possible, make it a list if you can. Do proper follow ups, not just event based reporting (i.e. tell me why the airplane crashed when the report is out, don't waste too much time with "we don't know anything, but here is a picture of smoke"). And of course list your sources (i.e. don't report on science paper without even linking it).
So far Wikipedia is the only one that gets somewhat close to this ideal. Almost everything else is just attention seeking clickbait.
Wikipedia now has this expectation that any claim that's at all surprising or interesting should be cited to "reliable sources". I don't entirely agree with WP's notion of what sources are to be considered reliable, but at least the policy is out there, and can be debated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources
This citation policy wasn't always there, and it has made a huge difference. For example, anyone can come along and remove surprising statements from articles if they aren't supported by a reliable source. That in turn means that if you find a statement surprising, you can go and check the source.
Wikipedia might have been like that in the past but it's long been corrupted. E.g. see the Philip Cross affair.
For a while on the Ukraine war I tried to find unbiased commentary and news but I think it was basically impossible.
The best I could find after looking all over was stitching together stories from sources who were biased to one side but still at least somewhat committed to the truth.
There's no hope of finding unbiased commentary on a war that's happening NOW. Even the history of wars that happened 1,000 years ago are hopelessly muddied by contemporary political agendas.
As far as Wikipedia is concerned, history is one of the areas that's least trustworthy; lots of history articles have teams of gatekeepers. It can help to read the talk pages (and the archives of the talk pages) to find out what's been disputed.
The fact that you can do that, and also inspect the entire edit history, really does make Wikipedia head and shoulders better than any other information resource, provided you read it with due scepticism.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Philip_Cross#Blocked...
Socially, that bias is a more important part than the news' factual content itself, making comments here about how to "eliminate" it appear as a weird display of cluelessness.
People rightfully wish for a harmonious society. Eliminating other people's utterances of discontent is an approach usually employed in dictatorships.
I disagree. I'm a regular reader of Guardian Online; that organ has multiple institutional biases. Stories get spiked if they don't align with that bias. Reporters are forced out if they fail to toe the line.
It's not just The Guardian; all commercial news sources share this property.
I find it very curious you would single out "The Guardian" of all publications. That organ is maybe the most independent one you will find today. It is owned by "The Scott Trust Limited", successor of the similarly named trust created to shield it from commercial interests.
Calling it a "commercial news source", as if it was the same as Murdoch's ilk, is an absurd take, even derogatory. Do you say that, because it is "centre-left"? What right-leaning source would you call "unbiased"?
The Guardian (and The Scott Trust) is institutionally biased. It backed the Balfour Declaration, and to this day it remains pro-zionist. It's also pro-war, and backed the invasion of Iraq. It's got a lot worse since the Assange dremels-and-angle-grinders affair; it has become the primary mouthpiece of the UK security services.
It has the reputation of being a leftie paper; but that's an illusion. It holds up the left end of the Overton Window, and reliably backs the extreme right wing of the Labour Party. Its attacks on Jeremy Corbyn were consistent and cringe-making; even the token leftists in the newsroom were forced to join the pile-in.
I call it a commercial news source, because that's exactly what it is; it's a business.
I don't call any source "unbiased"; as I said up-thread, I don't think unbiased reporting is possible.
Some people would call that bias.
It's impossible to have unbiased news unless you're an omnipresent God.
As an experiment, let's just think of the news industry as specialising in those two business lines. ^_^
Bias cannot be eliminated from the news business -- bias is the business. Even the sincerity of declared bias is no guarantee of good faith/ethics.
Consider the challenges that Wikipedia faces trying to represent knowledge about history and events in an objective manner.
"News" means different scope at different levels of conception.
* NL0 = personal, individual; at this level, "news" is the for-profit business of feeding (and shaping) the individual mass of feelings and stubborn opinions; the only objective things at NL0 are Maslow's hierarchy and *the local weather*.
* NL1 = regional power structure; at this level, "news" becomes part of regional economics, social policy, and broad weather patterns; political theatre begins obvious pandering at this level.
* NL2 = national power structure; at this level, national economic and social policy, regional economic tensions, perspective of international power structures and spheres of influence; political pandering is intense.
* NL3 = international power structures; at this level, various nations compete and/or cooperate economically and militarily; there are spheres of geopolitical influence.
News "for the people" really depends on how militant the people are prepared to be.
So, for the most part, power structures write the news. State-funded news is only as reliable as popular confidence in the state providing the funding.[2]
[1] _ https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/quotes/the-worst-form...
“ Once we have a list of related headlines, we then use GPT-3 to generate a list of facts, not opinions, that are present within each of those headline’s respective articles.”
“ We then run the article through a “bias checker,” which uses sentiment analysis to rate the sentiment polarity of the generated article.”
"On Tuesday, SpaceX conducted an uncrewed sub-orbital test of its Starship rocket system in Texas. The spacecraft, which is designed to carry up to 100 astronauts to Mars, exploded within minutes of takeoff."
"100 astronauts to Mars?"
The launch was originally scheduled for Tuesday, April 18, but was delayed until Thursday, April 20. The story appears on NewsNotFound on Friday, April 21, as a current event.
There needs to be a step in this process which constructs timelines.
[1] https://newsnotfound.com/spacex-starship-rocket-system-explo...
I've read all comments and I realise that I'm presenting this project completely wrong.
It's theoretically impossible to be 100% unbiased, and I'm currently misleading people by stating this across the site.
However, it's not impossible, and quite easy, to be 'the most unbiased' news source.
I believe the project can and will have a net-positive impact, by reducing the effects of sensationalism in the news.
Even if NewsNotFound articles were only 90% neutral, that's 90% BETTER than reading the same story from a sensationalist source.
This project has the potential to provide a platform for readers to digest the news in a 'less biased' way than anywhere else on the internet.
Whether people want this, or prefer to read from biased sources because it's more emotive and relatable, is another issue and I think will stay a matter of preference.
I will update all socials, whitepaper, etc. to reflect this and I apologise for my ignorance initially.
There are a few other fundamental issues that people have pointed out, which I will try to fix over time.
Thank you all for your feedback and insight.
If anyone would like to contribute to the project, here is the GitHub repo: https://github.com/joshwallerr/newsnotfound
It's great that you are committed to providing less biased news.
But AI is not less biased, and the first step is to realize that you are not magically less biased than all the other humans who produce news. Unless you see your own bias, you can't manage for it. In fact, I think a good number of journlists do that quite well.
So do you, implicitly: Where will NewsNotFound get the 'facts' that it publishes, other than the journalists who go out, gather it, and report it? You can't witness it and report it yourself, beyond a tiny fraction of events.
Some of the criticisms are harsh but fair, yet I think that anybody who takes the time to read the "white paper" and acknowledge the admirable dedication to building in the open will see there is genuine potential and passion in this occasionally mad project.
I love the energy and hope the (young) creators won't be too downhearted by the equal passion in some of the negative responses; a good indicator that the valid points about inherent AI and other bias have been listened to will be an updating of some of the language and soundbites used to sell this interesting project.
On a more personal response, I thought the articles I tried were really pretty good in terms of being "free from bias", with the obvious negative corollary that they were rather dry.
Bias is ok, it comes with passion often, it becomes a problem when it's not seen or overwhelms and controls.
The articles were also quite long, which may not be appealing drained of emotion and creativity; I think the At A Glance summaries will prove to be the most valuable. The pictures were mad, I liked them though.
Cool project overall, with the obvious issues noted.
Best of luck going forward!
I normally try and be positive / open to flawed ideas or initiatives but in this particular case I think describing it as "a little naive" massively understates it. Well motivated it might be, the naivety is gargantuan. This isn't a nice idea with some flaws, this is a fundamentally misguided idea at its core. Utterly irredeemable.
I wish the authors luck in that I hope they can step away & move on to something more worthwhile without being hurt or becoming defensive about criticism. Given the level of backlash in the comments here, its understandable that may be tough to do, but I really wouldn't want to encourage them to continue.
You could write a PhD on the biases absorbed into this image.
This has already existed in the form of spam WordPress blogs[1] for years now anyways.
There are already article creation plugins for Wordpress:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/mycurator/
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.
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 multiple sources.
Contrary to popular opinion, bias is actually pretty easy to spot, its just that you need more than one source to find it. This approach just isn't going to help, it just strips away context from any bias and presents them as stand alone sentences.
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.
Similarly, a few days later security forces went to arrest the perpetrators of the attack, and were themselves attacked with Molotov cocktails and large stones thrown from a high floor. They returned fire, and one of the attackers, a 15 year old boy, was killed. The BBC headline read "SpecificCountry soldiers murder 15 year old Foobar boy". No mention was made of the attack on the security forces, nor of the attack on the car to which the security forces were responding. At least, not in the first few paragraphs that I read, which mostly concerned themselves with other incidents in which Foobar citizens were hurt or killed by SpecificCountry forces, with absolutely no context.
Nothing published was an outright lie. But the omission paints a bias by itself. How could this AI-powered "unbiased news company" form an unbiased version of events, when the relevant information is not even provided by the sources?
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.
Going deeper in terms of analysis, in the US, the PBS news hour is the highest quality.
Internationally, I read Reuters which seems similar to how the AP works, but I don’t have anything to compare it to.
But it's an admirable experiment. Impressive that Josh Waller (that's the name on the github repo) went all the way with this.
My initial impression was that it is some kind of satire but he seems to be playing it straight. If that's the case then I just don't get the preoccupation with "unbiased".
Journalism always has a bias at some level. Whether it becomes a problem that needs to be addressed is a matter of degree and intent. I would even say that streams of "just facts" without context, without some point of view are uninteresting to a reader unless they're performing certain kinds of tasks which benefit from such a stream-- but that is very different from "news".
Why pick such a stupid name? The Twitter handle is already taken by a parody account titled "Real FakeNews", that didn't tip you off as to how this name would be received?
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 interview. A few paragraphs of instruction don’t change the basic nature of multi-layer network synthesis. For that, you need a rigorous training and a network of peers ready to check you when you are led astray by your basic nature — and that requires having multiple viewpoints to mitigate groupthink.
I mean no disrespect, but I hope this project fails.
It's the same reason why passive voice writing such as "police-involved shooting" are problematic and biased.
Luckily there are multiple news orgs not beholden such things like Al-Jazeera, although its funded by the qatari government its practically independent with many awards and reporting representing the middle east, that's why they were able to stand against american lies in Iraq(to the point the U.S. requited Qatar to limit them), and truly cover the occupation in Palestine.
Just don't trust their reporting about Qatar.
Here a good video about Qatar and why Aljazeera exists https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKx7TPGttSk
But I think the bigger issue is more about the coverage of stories. Outlets are certainly going to cater their audience. Example: maybe from sources you see more stories on white-on-black shootings, and in another source you see more black-on-white shootings. So which one is more "newsworthy"? That's where a lot of bias comes into play.
> Step 1: For each category, we begin by scraping the latest headlines from publicly available news sites.
That said, I'd like to know the categories and what sites are scraped, because there may be bias in the selection of such.
Step 2 seems like a process to directly bias the inputs based on the popularity of each outlet. Or rather two processes, one hidden, because the outlets aren't selecting themselves. Why wouldn't this just be a wire service and press release detector?
It’s kind cool in that it: - removes/neutralizes words that tends to flavor articles toward any particular position and focuses mainly on factual non-emotional type language. - sends blurbs out in a daily email (arguably editorial) - but generally tends to be well rounded important stories to keep you in the know about what’s going on
It’s pretty cool, because unlike most new sources you don’t get a feeling anyone’s trying to railroad you down a particular way of thinking, but you feel like you’re just being presented with (more or less) statements about what is going on in the world.
Duplicate articles on today's (Apr 22, 2023) front page:
> World News:
> Russian Warplane Accidentally Drops Bomb, Injuring Two in Belgorod April 21, 2023
> Russian Fighter Jet Accidentally Bombs City Near Ukraine Border April 21, 2023
> United States
> US Supreme Court Blocks Restrictions on Abortion Pill Mifepristone April 22, 2023
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I think a more useful approach would be to aggregate stories from different sources together and summarize the agreed and contested information and viewpoints. That would be a useful tool for evaluating news and identifying propaganda narratives.
Whee!
(meaning media that doesn't fact check their lies and doesn't tell facts they dislike)
If you tell a chatbot trained on the internet to be unbiased how do you know which definition it will apply?
How can any particular Individual be "unbiased"? It's impossible. Yet only an individual is "alive" and "living" the way it is legally/socially defined.
Wow, this seems heavily biased
So two “meh” and many “wtf”. Refinements remain to be made.
I tend to read a variety of news sources that claim to be biased and then mentally account for that bias.
Also, your site is down…
That comes across as very naive. "Ensures", really?
It's time to completely obliterate this meme. Local news are not relevant. They never were, they never will be. Let's see what my local newspaper has to say for today:
- weather today (probably less acurate than other sources)
- local grandma is about to turn 103
- car crash in midtown (nobody was injured)
- motorcyclist crashed (minor injuries)
- the results of a soccer match nobody cares about
- some section of the park will be renewed
- mishmash of national news and international news (copy pasted)
Even if someone you care about has an accident, you'll find out before you check this. The only thing would be a site that keeps track of the city's history or something like that. That and ads for local businesses... and obituaries.
That's either naive or a lie
This would allow us to hold reporters accountable for bias, misinformation, and sensationalism.
Now imagine we could also dictate and control these thought processes and intentions, so as to ensure they aren't aligned with any particular viewpoint or political agenda.
Unfortunately, this isn't possible in humans (yet).
NewsNotFound proposes a solution to this problem, by removing the human middle-man between you and the news.
With open-sourced code, anyone can now see exactly what goes on behind the scenes of article creation.
This is the key to a trusted news company - complete transparency and the opportunity for anyone, anywhere to contribute.
Whitepaper: https://newsnotfound.com/whitepaper/
GitHub Repo: https://github.com/joshwallerr/newsnotfound
> This is the key to a trusted news company - complete transparency and the opportunity for anyone, anywhere to contribute.
Why do I want anyone, anywhere? What does that have to do with news? I want to hear from the best, not from the entire range.
It all comes down to who you trust.
Also, LLMs are biased, but through prompt engineering and other techniques, you can produce neutrally-written text.
I realise now that my messaging with this project is off. What would more accurately explain the purpose of this project is to reduce the effects of sensationalism and indoctrination in the news.
In other words, provide a platform for readers to make up their own opinions on news stories by filtering out the positive/negative language and putting as much focus on facts as possible.
Even if NewsNotFound articles are only 90% neutral, that's 90% BETTER than reading the same story from a sensationalist source.
Through thinking and editing, humans can (and often do) produce neutrally written text.
What does AI change? Also, who decides what's neutral? The AI's programmers and operators - humans. Who decides if your AI's output is neutral - you do. Why couldn't you do the same with a human writer?
> Even if NewsNotFound articles are only 90% neutral, that's 90% BETTER than reading the same story from a sensationalist source.
Nothing is 100% sensationalistic. Anyway, I can (and do) find endless non-sensationalistic news.
AI changes nothing; you are an editor (which is a good thing to be - I wish you well).
But the idea that AI is somehow more neutral than humans, or that humans aren't in control here, is very dangerous. That is my concern.
And as noted elsewhere, AI is not inherently unbiased. In fact, one of the big problems with AI is that it introduces systemic bias, and understanding the role of fairness is very important here. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22916602/ai-bias-fairness...
I would also raise the point that journalism is actually moving past this idea of objectivity at all costs, where writers intentionally wear their point of view on their sleeve. It is no longer a negative to be purely unbiased. In fact, there are real concerns that objectivity leads to important questions not being asked or presented. (You might have heard the term “the view from nowhere.” That’s what I’m getting at.)
To be clear, the work of journalists should not go unchallenged, but this feels like something you should spend time actually talking to some experts on journalism before you actually build it. The mindset you’re presenting here does not suggest you have.
That said as others have mentioned, LLVM’s are inherently biased through their training and this site only picks from moderate and left wing sites, bringing into question whether it could ever be unbiased.
Not trying to classify would make choosing sources that are actually representative impossible unless the creator were operating under the illusion that unbiased sources are a thing.
That said you can find the publishers they use in this list https://github.com/joshwallerr/newsnotfound/blob/main/scrape... if you want to make your own decision.
Further I want to add I don't think this is a bad idea, I just think the idea of collecting "unbiased news", although desirable, is unfortunately impossible. The idea and model they've developed however may be very good.
It's hard to believe that someone who works with AI to this degree would think for a moment that it is unbiased. It's an attempt to deceive the ignorant, for whatever purpose.