New AI "Journalist" Is Rewriting the News to Remove Bias

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: April 8, 2018 at 8:15:36 AM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] A New AI "Journalist" Is Rewriting the News to Remove Bias
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> [Note:  This item comes from friend Robert Berger.  DLH]
>
> A New AI “Journalist” Is Rewriting the News to Remove Bias
> By Kristin Houser
> Apr 6 2018
> <https://futurism.com/ai-journalist-media-bias-news-knowhere/>
>
> Want your news delivered with the icy indifference of a literal robot? You might want to bookmark the newly launched 
> site Knowhere News. Knowhere is a startup that combines machine learning technologies and human journalists to 
> deliver the facts on popular news stories.
>
> Here’s how it works. First, the site’s artificial intelligence (AI) chooses a story based on what’s popular on the 
> internet right now. Once it picks a topic, it looks at more than a thousand news sources to gather details. 
> Left-leaning sites, right-leaning sites – the AI looks at them all.
>
> Then, the AI writes its own “impartial” version of the story based on what it finds (sometimes in as little as 60 
> seconds). This take on the news contains the most basic facts, with the AI striving to remove any potential bias. The 
> AI also takes into account the “trustworthiness” of each source, something Knowhere’s co-founders preemptively 
> determined. This ensures a site with a stellar reputation for accuracy isn’t overshadowed by one that plays a little 
> fast and loose with the facts.
>
> For some of the more political stories, the AI produces two additional versions labeled “Left” and “Right.” Those 
> skew pretty much exactly how you’d expect from their headlines:
>
>    • Impartial: “US to add citizenship question to 2020 census”
>    • Left: “California sues Trump administration over census citizenship question”
>    • Right: “Liberals object to inclusion of citizenship question on 2020 census”
>
> Some controversial but not necessarily political stories receive “Positive” and “Negative” spins:
>
>    • Impartial: “Facebook scans things you send on messenger, Mark Zuckerberg admits”
>    • Positive: “Facebook reveals that it scans Messenger for inappropriate content”
>    • Negative: “Facebook admits to spying on Messenger, ‘scanning’ private images and links”
>
> Even the images used with the stories occasionally reflect the content’s bias. The “Positive” Facebook story features 
> CEO Mark Zuckerberg grinning, while the “Negative” one has him looking like his dog just died.
>
> Knowhere’s AI isn’t putting journalists out of work, either.
>
> Editor-in-chief and co-founder Nathaniel Barling told Motherboard that a pair of human editors review every story. 
> This ensures you feel like you’re reading something written by an actual journalist, and not a Twitter chatbot. Those 
> edits are then fed back into the AI, helping it improve over time. Barling himself then approves each story before it 
> goes live. “The buck stops with me,” he told Motherboard.
>
> This human element could be the tech’s major flaw. As we’ve seen with other AIs, they tend to take on the biases of 
> their creators, so Barling and his editors will need to be as impartial as humanly possible — literally — to ensure 
> the AI retains its impartiality.
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/
> Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp



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