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Comment by mtweak | Hacker News Reader

This is extremely problematic. Much of news is highly syndicated, so what looks like 10 credible sources are actually just 2. I think the best you can aim for is empirical sources: receipts, videos, photo evidence, public disclosures directly at the source. Archiving is ok if disclosed.

I don't think LLMs can discern truth when the majority of news sources are incentivized primarily for views.

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Filed both issues from this: https://github.com/SerhiiKorniienko/bullshit-detector/issues... - for syndication https://github.com/SerhiiKorniienko/bullshit-detector/issues... - empirical sources

Empirical sources - would be a first candidate to be implemented in a skill. And you are right about 10 credible sources are actually 2. It will look like 10 independent sources to it, real gap. Skill does prefer primary source over secondary. For example it'll prefer NASA article over blog post who cited NASA article.

I'll work on empirical sources improvement in a next releases.

You may have overlooked this part of the parent's comment which addresses your syndication issue:

> Something along the lines of when you have two accounts that disagree traditionally and they agree on something. That's how you know it's likely to be true.

Outfits that blindly parrot talking points would not be at odds and thus not be good candidates.

It also doesn't help that many news sources will knowingly fudge the truth. There are topics about which they are constant sources of misinformation. Seems like depending on the topic (anything science related) you wouldn't want to use news sources at all. Other topics, you probably only want to use news sources. And arranging all of this weighting of sources is going to be difficult and controversial as well. Doesn't mean it can't be done. Doesn't mean it wouldn't be valuable. But there is a lot to it and most of it isn't so much about technology or math as it is about understanding who should and shouldn't be considered authoritative about what topics.

Sounds challenging to me...

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