Look, I agree with some of this. Full disclaimer, I am building that service that pulls in primary sources and aggregates/synthesizes (https://www.forth.news)
But there is more to journalism/reporting than what youre talking about. Reporters cultivate sources. They can do investigations. They go to places so they aren't relying on a stranger with a live stream.
"The product can be packaged for mass consumption with ads and subliminals and be valued according to the effective influence it has on either manipulating the audience, or resulting in some degree of commercial activity." is incredibly cynical -- and that i think is the problem. The reporting needs to be valuable on its own -- that is and has been my sole point.
Even the basic act of deciding which stories to cover can be seen as bias.
Which experts are we seeking out? What are their agendas?
Altering facts and statements is not bias, it is incorrect reporting. Anything reported as factual that is not is wrong, period, full stop.
But framing? You can frame a story any way you see fit.
And as I was trying to get to in the earlier comment, "bias" is in the eye of the beholder. What might be straight down the middle for one reader could be wildly biased to another.
This is sort of what I mean in one of the other comments regarding biases. This is an entirely subjective take, not to mention vague. Who redefined it? Whose journalism were they redefining? Everyone's, or specific people/outlet?
"it would be in the people's best interest" -- the problem is that as we're seeing, people do not seem to agree, at least not when voting with their wallets.
And who determines what is "unbiased?" If I don't match your biases, am I biased?
Part of the problem is deciding what journalism is.
I don't mean that in terms of the craft -- I was a journalist for many years in the legacy media. We knew what we were doing, and were proud of our work. The issue is that like any other art/craft/trade, being good at it isn't enough. Is this a charity? A public good? A business? A hobby?
Good journalism is very expensive. It requires people doing real work who need to be paid, and sometimes big logistical expenses -- going into a war zone without body armor, specialized transport, security, etc., seems like a really bad idea.
If it is a business, then the questions every business needs to ask itself are "who is the customer?" and "what value are we giving them that they are willing to pay for?". Financial news does this really well. People will pay for the Wall Street Journal, or a Bloomberg Terminal, etc, because the news they get from these outlets helps them trade successfully. Some outlets are required reading for certain industries -- Politico Pro, the Information, etc. But who does general news benefit? How do we get them to pay?
I've noticed a lot of weaselly statistics associated with AI adoption.
Company replaces phone support with AI chatbot, then says "Call center interactions dropped 80%! People must really love our AI bot," even though they were given no other choice.
AI features are popular in the sense that people are using it. I think the popularity lessens when asked if people want these features.
My point being that people who visit chatgpt.com/claude.com/etc by their own free will are not the same as people who now have to use AI summaries on Google because they are just showing up there and making the ten blue links harder to find.
Zeroing out the gas tax aside, the EV tax makes _some_ sense.
Gas taxes provide the revenue that help pay for road maintenance and the rest of the infrastructure that cars use. Gas taxes made sense -- the more you drive, the more you chip in to keep the road system going.
That infrastructure still needs to exist, and will still cost money to maintain -- but if fewer people are buying gas, then the funds will dry up, even as usage stays relatively the same.
The government is very big. They can have multiple priorities. The Dept of Justice does not provide medical care, education, or anything else you listed -- they prosecute crimes. And using classified military plans for personal gain while potentially putting fellow soldiers at risk seems like a crime that is worth prosecuting.
I have a little bit of a bias here, as I am building forth.news, which is an AI-powered news platform -- but I am also a former journalist.
It's not necessarily contradictory. I see this more like giving your employees cars, but telling them they are responsible if they get into accidents.
All of this is entirely predicated on expectation and responsibility. First, mark something as being AI if it cannot be verified, and verify everything that you can.
Forth is using AI so we can detect and push out stories as quickly as possible, getting breaking news out there as soon as it breaks. Our summaries are AI, but marked as AI. Our underlying source information is right there and cited. We try to be as transparent as possible about the tools we are using, and the tradeoffs.
Every journalist should instinctively and reflexively double check everything, regardless of the source. There's an old maxim, "if your mom tells you she loves you, check it out." Being from an LLM doesn't change that.
Thank you -- yes, the non-signed in front page needs some work. There's a lot of flood warnings, but if you choose topics with an account it should be a better experience.
And thank you for flagging the scroll thing. I hadn't seen it, but will check.
AI isn't really the draw, it's more of a tool that helps on the backend.
That said, it's both combining various updates into a cohesive timeline of a story, writing the summaries, and assigning it an urgency level which helps in sorting and some other tasks.
Building a new kind of news site, featuring updates from primary sources.
We're constantly pulling info from official sources, and using AI to group and summarize into stories, and continue to share reporting from trusted, vetted journalists.
The result is news with the speed and breadth of getting updates straight from the source, and the perspective and context that reporting provides.
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