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Comment by newsnotfound | Hacker News Reader

Imagine you could see into the minds of news reporters - their intentions, thought processes, and emotions when writing articles.

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

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This idea punches down. Journalists work so hard to complete the work they do. They do not need this.

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.

This doesn’t replace journalists, it’s just an AI driven link aggregator.

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.

Its positioning is designed to question the legitimacy and objectivity of traditional journalism while positioning itself as an alternative. That deserves more pushback than the average aggregator does.

Just trying to settle on a definition on left, moderate, etc would grind this thing to a halt. Most of what people call left is center by any view I would consider well-founded. Then there are places where what passes for center in the US would be far right.

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.

Honestly I agree, it's a matter of perspective and even most self described left or right-wing outlets will have journalists who occasionally write articles that swing the other way.

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.

In addition to the completely unfounded and false claim that AI is unbiased, there's this:

> 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.

This is referring to how the open-sourced code provides the freedom for anyone to criticise or correct the way the site works through contribution.

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 prompt engineering and other techniques, you can produce neutrally-written text

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.

Haven't you heard? The era of expertise is over! Anyone's opinion is exactly as valuable as anyone else's - in fact, the opinion of someone who is not an expert is _more_ valuable than that of an expert!

That's often true though. One way the media biases articles is by constant reliance on people presented as neutral experts but who don't satisfy the definition used by most people. Normally an expert is defined as someone who displays unusual skill or knowledge within a domain. The media tends to define it very differently, as "someone working for a public sector institution or NGO who claims to be an expert". No actual objective test of expertise is done before presenting that person's views as the final word on a topic and if the views of that person are being challenged by other people who know a lot but aren't institutionally affiliated, then that is just ignored entirely.

Who defines the best? Who defines unbiased?

It all comes down to who you trust.

It takes real judgement and critical thought. It can't be done by algorithm. Sorry I have no easy answer for life.

A bit of an obscure reference for the anglocentric crowd, but Night Guard’s news in the Twilight World is exactly what your lede is imagining.

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