dewayne@warpspeed.com
Date: April 8, 2018 at 8:15:36 AM EDT
[Note: This item comes from friend Robert Berger. DLH]
Kristin Houser, Futurism, 6 Apr 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: U.S. 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.