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Current top comment on the WSJ: === The examples given are "contrarian bot" rather than "fact checking bot." e.g., "The doctor quoted in this post does not h

Current top comment on the WSJ: === The examples given are "contrarian bot" rather than "fact checking bot." e.g., "The doctor quoted in this post does not have proper qualifications." Fine, but that doesn't mean he's wrong. e.g., “The internet has a lot of information on drinking water. Doctors say not all of it is credible.” No kidding. But this doesn't mean "stay hydrated" was bad advice. I'm having difficulty finding the value of something like this is. I suppose if you're too timid to push back against other people it might be nice to have a bot to do it. Like the example where it's culturally inappropriate to push back on your elders, so you introduce a piece of software to contradict everything they say. Fine, maybe that feels good in a strange way, but it seems dysfunctional, passive aggressive, and unproductive. The bot isn't giving advice, it's just saying "that's YOUR opinion" to everyone else's advice ===

roywiggins 8y ago
I've known people with the same conversational style as this bot, and they are absolute hell to talk to unless you decide to gamify it and play with finding the least objectionable thing they could find fault with.
- Bartweiss 8y ago
  I'll bet treating this bot as a gatekeeper would actually be pretty interesting - try the same claim or story repeatedly and see what you can do to sneak it past. - Can you find the same stuff on a more-reputable site? (Perhaps the bot doesn't know about those "user blog" sections sometimes hosted under news-site domains?) - Can you find a different attribution for the same quote that doesn't throw a 'credentials' flag? (Perhaps less information is better, because writing "a doctor said" will impede checking up on the speaker's credentials?) - How about just contorting the phrasing of sentences until the bot can no longer extract anything useful about their meaning? What does it do with double negatives and nested clauses? I don't want this bot in my group chats, but I could imagine using it as an adversary to refine a trolling bot. If you wanted to train up a realistic version of Shiri's Scissor, this might be an effective way to craft posts that are especially hard to refute.
Bartweiss 8y ago
This reads like somebody based ELIZA on Monty Python's argument clinic instead of a therapist. Alert fatigue kicks in easily under the best circumstances, and "an annoying bot cluttering a group text" is hardly the best of circumstances. If the bot limited itself to high-confidence assertions that a claim is factually false, I'd be interested. (I wouldn't use it, the social and privacy aspects guarantee that, but I'd be interested in the tech.) But "not all information about water is credible" isn't fact-checking; it's a tool you could duplicate with keyword recognition and a list of random stock refutations. Maybe I'm overzealous, but I'd consider removing an actual human from a group-chat if they consistently made that sort of post.

roywiggins 8y ago

I've known people with the same conversational style as this bot, and they are absolute hell to talk to unless you decide to gamify it and play with finding the least objectionable thing they could find fault with.

Bartweiss 8y ago
I'll bet treating this bot as a gatekeeper would actually be pretty interesting - try the same claim or story repeatedly and see what you can do to sneak it past. - Can you find the same stuff on a more-reputable site? (Perhaps the bot doesn't know about those "user blog" sections sometimes hosted under news-site domains?) - Can you find a different attribution for the same quote that doesn't throw a 'credentials' flag? (Perhaps less information is better, because writing "a doctor said" will impede checking up on the speaker's credentials?) - How about just contorting the phrasing of sentences until the bot can no longer extract anything useful about their meaning? What does it do with double negatives and nested clauses? I don't want this bot in my group chats, but I could imagine using it as an adversary to refine a trolling bot. If you wanted to train up a realistic version of Shiri's Scissor, this might be an effective way to craft posts that are especially hard to refute.

Bartweiss 8y ago

This reads like somebody based ELIZA on Monty Python's argument clinic instead of a therapist. Alert fatigue kicks in easily under the best circumstances, and "an annoying bot cluttering a group text" is hardly the best of circumstances. If the bot limited itself to high-confidence assertions that a claim is factually false, I'd be interested. (I wouldn't use it, the social and privacy aspects guarantee that, but I'd be interested in the tech.) But "not all information about water is credible" isn't fact-checking; it's a tool you could duplicate with keyword recognition and a list of random stock refutations. Maybe I'm overzealous, but I'd consider removing an actual human from a group-chat if they consistently made that sort of post.