14 ms·

NewsNotFound: An open-source, unbiased news company

110 points by newsnotfound 3y ago

newsnotfound 3y ago
Imagine you could see into the minds of news reporters - their intentions, thought processes, and emotions when writing articles. This would allow us to hold reporters accountable for bias, misinformation, and sensationalism. Now imagine we could also dictate and control these thought processes and intentions, so as to ensure they aren't aligned with any particular viewpoint or political agenda. Unfortunately, this isn't possible in humans (yet). NewsNotFound proposes a solution to this problem, by removing the human middle-man between you and the news. With open-sourced code, anyone can now see exactly what goes on behind the scenes of article creation. This is the key to a trusted news company - complete transparency and the opportunity for anyone, anywhere to contribute. Whitepaper: https://newsnotfound.com/whitepaper/ https://newsnotfound.com/whitepaper/ GitHub Repo: https://github.com/joshwallerr/newsnotfound https://github.com/joshwallerr/newsnotfound
- vladf 3y ago
  A bit of an obscure reference for the anglocentric crowd, but Night Guard’s news in the Twilight World is exactly what your lede is imagining.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  In addition to the completely unfounded and false claim that AI is unbiased, there's this: > This is the key to a trusted news company - complete transparency and the opportunity for anyone, anywhere to contribute. Why do I want anyone, anywhere? What does that have to do with news? I want to hear from the best, not from the entire range.
  - scubbo 3y ago
    Haven't you heard? The era of expertise is over! Anyone's opinion is exactly as valuable as anyone else's - in fact, the opinion of someone who is not an expert is _more_ valuable than that of an expert!
    - revelio 3y ago
      That's often true though. One way the media biases articles is by constant reliance on people presented as neutral experts but who don't satisfy the definition used by most people. Normally an expert is defined as someone who displays unusual skill or knowledge within a domain. The media tends to define it very differently, as "someone working for a public sector institution or NGO who claims to be an expert". No actual objective test of expertise is done before presenting that person's views as the final word on a topic and if the views of that person are being challenged by other people who know a lot but aren't institutionally affiliated, then that is just ignored entirely.
  - rajin444 3y ago
    Who defines the best? Who defines unbiased? It all comes down to who you trust.
    - wolverine876 3y ago
      It takes real judgement and critical thought. It can't be done by algorithm. Sorry I have no easy answer for life.
  - newsnotfound 3y ago
    This is referring to how the open-sourced code provides the freedom for anyone to criticise or correct the way the site works through contribution. Also, LLMs are biased, but through prompt engineering and other techniques, you can produce neutrally-written text. I realise now that my messaging with this project is off. What would more accurately explain the purpose of this project is to reduce the effects of sensationalism and indoctrination in the news. In other words, provide a platform for readers to make up their own opinions on news stories by filtering out the positive/negative language and putting as much focus on facts as possible. Even if NewsNotFound articles are only 90% neutral, that's 90% BETTER than reading the same story from a sensationalist source.
    - wolverine876 3y ago
      > through prompt engineering and other techniques, you can produce neutrally-written text Through thinking and editing, humans can (and often do) produce neutrally written text. What does AI change? Also, who decides what's neutral? The AI's programmers and operators - humans. Who decides if your AI's output is neutral - you do. Why couldn't you do the same with a human writer? > Even if NewsNotFound articles are only 90% neutral, that's 90% BETTER than reading the same story from a sensationalist source. Nothing is 100% sensationalistic. Anyway, I can (and do) find endless non-sensationalistic news. AI changes nothing; you are an editor (which is a good thing to be - I wish you well). But the idea that AI is somehow more neutral than humans, or that humans aren't in control here, is very dangerous. That is my concern.
- shortformblog 3y ago
  This idea punches down. Journalists work so hard to complete the work they do. They do not need this. And as noted elsewhere, AI is not inherently unbiased. In fact, one of the big problems with AI is that it introduces systemic bias, and understanding the role of fairness is very important here. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22916602/ai-bias-fairness-tradeoffs-artificial-intelligence https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22916602/ai-bias-fairness... I would also raise the point that journalism is actually moving past this idea of objectivity at all costs, where writers intentionally wear their point of view on their sleeve. It is no longer a negative to be purely unbiased. In fact, there are real concerns that objectivity leads to important questions not being asked or presented. (You might have heard the term “the view from nowhere.” That’s what I’m getting at.) To be clear, the work of journalists should not go unchallenged, but this feels like something you should spend time actually talking to some experts on journalism before you actually build it. The mindset you’re presenting here does not suggest you have.
  - guywithahat 3y ago
    This doesn’t replace journalists, it’s just an AI driven link aggregator. That said as others have mentioned, LLVM’s are inherently biased through their training and this site only picks from moderate and left wing sites, bringing into question whether it could ever be unbiased.
    - Kye 3y ago
      Just trying to settle on a definition on left, moderate, etc would grind this thing to a halt. Most of what people call left is center by any view I would consider well-founded. Then there are places where what passes for center in the US would be far right. Not trying to classify would make choosing sources that are actually representative impossible unless the creator were operating under the illusion that unbiased sources are a thing.
      - guywithahat 3y ago
        Honestly I agree, it's a matter of perspective and even most self described left or right-wing outlets will have journalists who occasionally write articles that swing the other way. That said you can find the publishers they use in this list https://github.com/joshwallerr/newsnotfound/blob/main/scrape.py https://github.com/joshwallerr/newsnotfound/blob/main/scrape... if you want to make your own decision. Further I want to add I don't think this is a bad idea, I just think the idea of collecting "unbiased news", although desirable, is unfortunately impossible. The idea and model they've developed however may be very good.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
wolverine876 3y ago
Their agenda is evident in their claim that AI is unbiased. It's hard to believe that someone who works with AI to this degree would think for a moment that it is unbiased. It's an attempt to deceive the ignorant, for whatever purpose.
- guywithahat 3y ago
  They probably trained it until it agreed with their personal opinion of what is unbiased
svc0 3y ago
What could possibly go wrong?
- HideousKojima 3y ago
  I see a libel suit in the near future, at a minimum.
altairprime 3y ago
> The headline should use completely neutral and unbiased language. Aim to be factual, not opinionated. This sounds incredibly dull and lifeless. If you’re writing an encyclopedia, it’s fine. If you’re looking to be acquihired by Bloomberg Wire, it’s fine. But, modern chatbot aren’t capable of adhering to the restriction “factual”, and will hallucinate information just as readily as a human witness might during an interview. A few paragraphs of instruction don’t change the basic nature of multi-layer network synthesis. For that, you need a rigorous training and a network of peers ready to check you when you are led astray by your basic nature — and that requires having multiple viewpoints to mitigate groupthink. I mean no disrespect, but I hope this project fails.
- flangola7 3y ago
  "Neutral" language isn't even necessarily unbiased. "Leader of Nazi Germany Adolf Hitler committed horrible and evil actions" isn't "neutral" but it is a statement of clear objective fact. It's the same reason why passive voice writing such as "police-involved shooting" are problematic and biased.
not2b 3y ago
"By replacing the human middle-man with our AI-centric article creation process, we eliminate the potential for bias and ensure that all coverage remains impartial." AI LLMs inherit biases from their training data and the constraints the model builders added. There's no such thing as unbiased reporting; the usual way that this is attempted is to claim that the "unbiased" position is halfway between the positions of the two dominant political parties in some country, which might look like intense bias to someone in another country.
- williamtrask 3y ago
  This ideology of “replace corrupt institutions with tech” is at the center of SV ideology going back to the 70s. It’s as flawed then as it is now, but it occasionally has wins. There’s a great documentary on the long history of this idea in tech, both wins and losses, called “all watched over by machines of loving grace”. Brilliant documentary.
  - asdfman123 3y ago
    That can also be framed as “erode legitimate institutions”
  - revelio 3y ago
    It has some big and pretty frequent wins in that department compared to any other culture or industry.
    - JoeJonathan 3y ago
      Such as?
      - revelio 3y ago
        Most obviously the tech industry has disempowered the telco business. They are now just "dumb pipes", whereas once they wanted to be all singing all dancing content providers. Wikipedia replaced Britannica. Linux has largely replaced Microsoft. iTunes Store and Spotify took away a lot of the power that RIAA had over artists. If you want to focus purely on governmental institutions then encryption put intel agencies / corrupt police on the back foot and the digitization of processes especially payments has killed off a lot of low level corruption. What other industry has such a record?
BMc2020 3y ago
https://uk.linkedin.com/in/joshwallerr https://uk.linkedin.com/in/joshwallerr
- zx8080 3y ago
  The link requires logging in. Any quotes to be highlighted?
  - BMc2020 3y ago
    you could join linkedin?
remram 3y ago
In addition to all the other comments pointing out how stupid this is, and how stupid your claims of non-bias are: Why pick such a stupid name? The Twitter handle is already taken by a parody account titled "Real FakeNews", that didn't tip you off as to how this name would be received?
Animats 3y ago
As expected, it has trouble with time and sequence. See "SpaceX Starship rocket system explodes during test flight".[1] "On Tuesday, SpaceX conducted an uncrewed sub-orbital test of its Starship rocket system in Texas. The spacecraft, which is designed to carry up to 100 astronauts to Mars, exploded within minutes of takeoff." "100 astronauts to Mars?" The launch was originally scheduled for Tuesday, April 18, but was delayed until Thursday, April 20. The story appears on NewsNotFound on Friday, April 21, as a current event. There needs to be a step in this process which constructs timelines. [1] https://newsnotfound.com/spacex-starship-rocket-system-explodes-during-test-flight/ https://newsnotfound.com/spacex-starship-rocket-system-explo...
- klyrs 3y ago
  I've read time and time again that there is no such thing as truth or fact. If the news is to be truly unbiased, it cannot have any basis in reality.
AiaAidan 3y ago
As someone who has worked in the media industry, I can tell you that the problem with unbiased news goes much deeper than simply presenting facts objectively. The very first step mentioned in your breakdown - scraping the latest headlines from publicly available news sites - is inherently biased, because it relies on a small selection of sources to determine what is considered newsworthy. But by whom? In reality, editors play a crucial role in shaping the news by deciding which events to cover and which to ignore, based on their own biases and interests. From my own experience, I can tell you that the most important news stories are often the ones that go unreported/underreported by most news sites. Unfortunately, there are also many insidious methods used to shape public opinion, such as distraction etc. But it all starts with the decisions made by editors about WHAT YOU, as a reader, should SEE and CARE about. So if we truly want to achieve unbiased news, we need to start by reevaluating the very definition of what is news.
- numbsafari 3y ago
  There is no such thing as unbiased news. Anyone claiming to be unbiased, rather than wearing their biases on their sleeves, is lying to you, or themselves, or they are just ignorant. Likely some combination of all three.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - paulddraper 3y ago
    Selection bias is insidious, and impossible to rid. By definition, news is things that are newsworthy. I.e. the most common things to tech receive coverage are the uncommon to things. If four people get shot over the weekend in Riverdale, not news. If four people get shot over the weekend in Beverly Hills, news. You don't even have to try to bias news for it be biased. (Now imagine if you try.)
    - numbsafari 3y ago
      Unless you live in Riverdale. Underreporting on violence in certain communities vs others is biased. Who determines what is uncommon vs common? Who decides the value of 4 people in Riverdale vs 4 people in Beverly Hills? Just going by “frequency of shootings” is a form of bias.
gfiorav 3y ago
This is interesting. I’d rather use the approach of Ground news: analyze everything published about a topic and let the reader decide.
JoshuaRedmond 3y ago
It seems to me that their view of bias is limited to a per-article approach. This could make it succeptible to broader narrative bias across stories - if, for example, the news sources are selectively only reporting on muggings when perpetrated by one race/nationality/immigration status/gender over another then it'll still give a false impression of attacks by those people, as it'll be completely blind to the lesser-reported cases.
t-3 3y ago
I'd rather a known and well-established bias than the algorithmic illusion of no bias. If I know the bias of my news provider, I can read them critically fairly easily. If I have to guess at the bias, that's much more difficult. I think a more useful approach would be to aggregate stories from different sources together and summarize the agreed and contested information and viewpoints. That would be a useful tool for evaluating news and identifying propaganda narratives.
annexrichmond 3y ago
It's not hard to discern bias within some article. Having more appropriate headlines is a good step, though. But I think the bigger issue is more about the coverage of stories. Outlets are certainly going to cater their audience. Example: maybe from sources you see more stories on white-on-black shootings, and in another source you see more black-on-white shootings. So which one is more "newsworthy"? That's where a lot of bias comes into play. > Step 1: For each category, we begin by scraping the latest headlines from publicly available news sites. That said, I'd like to know the categories and what sites are scraped, because there may be bias in the selection of such.
pessimizer 3y ago
> Step 2: Using sentence embedding, we identify any headlines that are related and choose these headlines as the subject of the article. The idea here is that if a story has multiple related headlines across different sources, it is more likely to be of greater importance than a story with none or only one related headline. This helps us determine which story to focus on and write an article about. Step 2 seems like a process to directly bias the inputs based on the popularity of each outlet. Or rather two processes, one hidden, because the outlets aren't selecting themselves. Why wouldn't this just be a wire service and press release detector?
Imnimo 3y ago
My favorite part is that step five allegedly ensures that the generated article is completely unbiased, and then the next step is immediately to run it through a bias checker. How do you write those sentences back to back and not realize something has gone awry?
claudiulodro 3y ago
"News organizations are terrible, so we take all of their work actually investigating, interviewing, and reporting about events, and run it through a GPT-powered article spinner without having to leave the house or do any original reporting" Doesn't really sound like a news company to me. Also, while I'm on the topic, "unbiased" news is an anti-pattern. A big part of the value of reporters is synthesizing and contextualizing events. Wikipedia current events[1] is basically unbiased news, but it has a tiny audience (and is still dependent on linking out to actual news organizations). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
Booktrope 3y ago
So, if this project were to be successful, it would replace news media as the outlet where people would look for news, thereby, reducing audience for the news media it's using as the source for it's information, which will provide less information due to reduced resources, and even more interestingly, get ever more sensationalist in trying to attract readers thereby increasing the bias of other media the AI depends on for information. Whee!
mellosouls 3y ago
Well there's been quite a backlash already, but I get the impression this is a well-motivated but perhaps a little naive attempt to do exactly what it says on the tin. Some of the criticisms are harsh but fair, yet I think that anybody who takes the time to read the "white paper" and acknowledge the admirable dedication to building in the open will see there is genuine potential and passion in this occasionally mad project. I love the energy and hope the (young) creators won't be too downhearted by the equal passion in some of the negative responses; a good indicator that the valid points about inherent AI and other bias have been listened to will be an updating of some of the language and soundbites used to sell this interesting project. On a more personal response, I thought the articles I tried were really pretty good in terms of being "free from bias", with the obvious negative corollary that they were rather dry. Bias is ok, it comes with passion often, it becomes a problem when it's not seen or overwhelms and controls. The articles were also quite long, which may not be appealing drained of emotion and creativity; I think the At A Glance summaries will prove to be the most valuable. The pictures were mad, I liked them though. Cool project overall, with the obvious issues noted. Best of luck going forward!
- lucideer 3y ago
  > a well-motivated but perhaps a little naive I normally try and be positive / open to flawed ideas or initiatives but in this particular case I think describing it as "a little naive" massively understates it. Well motivated it might be, the naivety is gargantuan. This isn't a nice idea with some flaws, this is a fundamentally misguided idea at its core. Utterly irredeemable. I wish the authors luck in that I hope they can step away & move on to something more worthwhile without being hurt or becoming defensive about criticism. Given the level of backlash in the comments here, its understandable that may be tough to do, but I really wouldn't want to encourage them to continue.
croes 3y ago
> completely neutral and unbiased That's either naive or a lie
nthdeui 3y ago
New snot found. Did their AI choose the url?
vivegi 3y ago
Their de-dupe filter needs some work. Duplicate articles on today's (Apr 22, 2023) front page: > World News: > Russian Warplane Accidentally Drops Bomb, Injuring Two in Belgorod April 21, 2023 > Russian Fighter Jet Accidentally Bombs City Near Ukraine Border April 21, 2023 > United States > US Supreme Court Blocks Restrictions on Abortion Pill Mifepristone April 22, 2023 > US Supreme Court Reviews Case on Mifepristone Restrictions April 21, 2023 > Alec Baldwin cleared of involuntary manslaughter charges in Halyna Hutchins shooting April 21, 2023 > Criminal Charges Dropped in Alec Baldwin On-Set Shooting Case April 21, 2023
SuzanSarong 3y ago
[flagged]
jonaharagon 3y ago
I assume this is satirical, but the other comments on this thread taking it seriously have me confused. This has already existed in the form of spam WordPress blogs[1] for years now anyways. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_spinning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_spinning
- JPLeRouzic 3y ago
  This site is built on Wordpress as it has a /wp-content/ folder. There are already article creation plugins for Wordpress: https://jasper.ai/ https://jasper.ai/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/mycurator/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/mycurator/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/bertha-ai-free/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/bertha-ai-free/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/content-bot/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/content-bot/
methou 3y ago
When enjoying good and insightful articles, I always assume that biases are deeply ingrained before an article was written. Author's educational background and affiliation plays a large role in how they write. Some of the biases are easy to spot and we can just laugh it out, but some of these are also unconscious bias. I would more likely to have an "AI" that identifies biases by analyzing the history of the authors, agencies, and related historical articles. It seems impossible to me as this is very aggressive on people who are working in the industry and a disrespect of their personhood. On the other hand, knowing what's happening in the world in a few sentenses is another thing, having GPT to check the bias and do some cross-ref checks is really sweet, after all I don't really care about most of the news.
bakugo 3y ago
Next time, please mention AI in the title so I can avoid clicking on it, thanks.
DangitBobby 3y ago
I really like the idea! I don't even mind that it hallucinates a little bit since I remember probably 10% of what I read and I'll read multiple sources for things that matter to me anyway. As for everyone commenting on bias: we all know there's no such thing as 0 bias.
langsoul-com 3y ago
The problem isn't the news sources. It's the incentives. A lot of those big media that people view as untrustworthy today were really good back then. But, eyeballs and ads result in emotional content and stories. Subscriptions means targeting a niche and always sticking with them, truth be dammed. Watch Netflix, their ads and subs business earns more than pure subscriptions. So now their incentives are you as a product, not good content.
endorphine 3y ago
I skimmed through the World section; it took 5 seconds to remember why I don't read the news. https://www.raptitude.com/2016/12/five-things-you-notice-when-you-quit-the-news/ https://www.raptitude.com/2016/12/five-things-you-notice-whe...
bedatadriven 3y ago
Yikes. There are many many issues here, but the images for the articles are the creepiest. Take a look at this article on conflict in Sudan: https://newsnotfound.com/conflict-in-sudan-causes-concern-for-neighboring-countries-and-us/ https://newsnotfound.com/conflict-in-sudan-causes-concern-fo... You could write a PhD on the biases absorbed into this image.
kseistrup 3y ago
Is there an overview over available RSS feeds?
asdfman123 3y ago
> The media landscape of today is one that is heavily polarised and sensationalised, Wow, this seems heavily biased
dermesser 3y ago
The idea that news could be "unbiased" is wrong. The fact that this is run by AI and called "unbiased" borders on ridiculous.
KaiserPro 3y ago
Reading the articles, you end up with vague sentences that are disjointed. Take this example: https://newsnotfound.com/new-seafood-and-italianinfluenced-restaurant-opens-in-norwich/ https://newsnotfound.com/new-seafood-and-italianinfluenced-r... this is a PR piece from a local news site. There is no critical thought as to why this is in the news. Not only is this not news, but it contains about 4 facts. The rest is vague useless information. If you want good quality news, you need to pay for it, from multiple sources. Contrary to popular opinion, bias is actually pretty easy to spot, its just that you need more than one source to find it. This approach just isn't going to help, it just strips away context from any bias and presents them as stand alone sentences.
- endorphine 3y ago
  Perhaps some human moderation as to which articles finally make it to the site would solve this?
  - KaiserPro 3y ago
    That would be editorial. But it needs more than that, GPT isn't very good a summarisation. None of these summaries are useful, and there is nothing stopping someone filling it with bias.
tanyajenkins1 3y ago
[flagged]
wesleywt 3y ago
The only news you should be paying attention to is local news. But the internet has destroyed that. Now we just have hateful news.
- throw22423 3y ago
  >The only news you should be paying attention to is local news It's time to completely obliterate this meme. Local news are not relevant. They never were, they never will be. Let's see what my local newspaper has to say for today: - weather today (probably less acurate than other sources) - local grandma is about to turn 103 - car crash in midtown (nobody was injured) - motorcyclist crashed (minor injuries) - the results of a soccer match nobody cares about - some section of the park will be renewed - mishmash of national news and international news (copy pasted) Even if someone you care about has an accident, you'll find out before you check this. The only thing would be a site that keeps track of the city's history or something like that. That and ads for local businesses... and obituaries.
watsonjs 3y ago
The two sentences in the article that tells me this will be a failure: “ Once we have a list of related headlines, we then use GPT-3 to generate a list of facts, not opinions, that are present within each of those headline’s respective articles.” “ We then run the article through a “bias checker,” which uses sentiment analysis to rate the sentiment polarity of the generated article.”
- Buhljingo 3y ago
  +1 Can't wait for GPT-3 to start disguising opinions as facts
- antegamisou 3y ago
  Couldn't be more textbook overzealous HN endeavor.
gadders 3y ago
I'm politically biassed but this company does a reasonable job of being un-biassed and even-handed. It's not the Economist but if you just a want a few interesting stories per day you could do worse: https://www.rocanews.com/ https://www.rocanews.com/
atoav 3y ago
Is it unbiased in the sense of the word, or in the sense that the US-far right uses the word where everything that doesn't support the far right narratives has a "liberal bias"? (meaning media that doesn't fact check their lies and doesn't tell facts they dislike) If you tell a chatbot trained on the internet to be unbiased how do you know which definition it will apply?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
crispyambulance 3y ago
Well, it's not news, the articles are insufferable. But it's an admirable experiment. Impressive that Josh Waller (that's the name on the github repo) went all the way with this. My initial impression was that it is some kind of satire but he seems to be playing it straight. If that's the case then I just don't get the preoccupation with "unbiased". Journalism always has a bias at some level. Whether it becomes a problem that needs to be addressed is a matter of degree and intent. I would even say that streams of "just facts" without context, without some point of view are uninteresting to a reader unless they're performing certain kinds of tasks which benefit from such a stream-- but that is very different from "news".
dotancohen 3y ago
Sounds like a great idea, but much of the bias in news is by way of lies of omission. For a recent example, last month BBC ran the headline "British woman, daughters, killed on road north of Foobar city". From the headline, one might never come to the conclusion that their car was shot by a passing vehicle, which then turned around and returned to shoot some more even after their vehicle crashed. And even the accompanying article did not make that clear until very deep in the article - and even then omitted much context. Similarly, a few days later security forces went to arrest the perpetrators of the attack, and were themselves attacked with Molotov cocktails and large stones thrown from a high floor. They returned fire, and one of the attackers, a 15 year old boy, was killed. The BBC headline read "SpecificCountry soldiers murder 15 year old Foobar boy". No mention was made of the attack on the security forces, nor of the attack on the car to which the security forces were responding. At least, not in the first few paragraphs that I read, which mostly concerned themselves with other incidents in which Foobar citizens were hurt or killed by SpecificCountry forces, with absolutely no context. Nothing published was an outright lie. But the omission paints a bias by itself. How could this AI-powered "unbiased news company" form an unbiased version of events, when the relevant information is not even provided by the sources?
clarkmcc 3y ago
The news sources that I trust the least are the news sources that claim to be “unbiased”. I tend to read a variety of news sources that claim to be biased and then mentally account for that bias. Also, your site is down…
denton-scratch 3y ago
"Unbiased" news is impossible; the reporter has biases, the editor has biases, the publisher has biases; which they may or may not be aware of. The biases they don't know about are the most insidious. So I'm most suspicious of sources that brag about their objectivity. I prefer sources that wear their bias on their sleeve (provided they're actually news sources, and not overt propaganda or gutter tabloids).
- ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
  Yes, but it's perfectly valid to attempt to minimise biases. Simple things such as fact-checking and not using loaded language can go a long way to becoming more neutral.
  - idopmstuff 3y ago
    But that's not what it says - it says it's unbiased, and leading with that doesn't exactly scream self-awareness about the problem at hand.
  - denton-scratch 3y ago
    Simple things that you mention are great. But probably the nastiest kind of bias is the choice of what news to deliver in the first place; it's hard to detect bias in a news source from what it isn't reporting.
  - remram 3y ago
    AI can't fact-check, only correlate sources with its limited understanding.
- grumbel 3y ago
  I'd much rather have one that tried to be objective, than just one that embraces their bias. The later one will always be terrible at reporting. The former at least has a chance of being good. Seriously, the bar is not exactly high. Start with telling me where and when something happen, make a time line if it's a series of events. Tell me who is involved. Don't dress it in flowery language, make it as simple as possible, make it a list if you can. Do proper follow ups, not just event based reporting (i.e. tell me why the airplane crashed when the report is out, don't waste too much time with "we don't know anything, but here is a picture of smoke"). And of course list your sources (i.e. don't report on science paper without even linking it). So far Wikipedia is the only one that gets somewhat close to this ideal. Almost everything else is just attention seeking clickbait.
kajaktum 3y ago
Unbiased news is an unsound business strategy. It actively is against human demand (despite needing it).
mrmckizzle 3y ago
I like to use https://ground.news/ https://ground.news/. At least it attempts to show you what the biases are based on political leanings.
jacooper 3y ago
Personally I think the most dangerous kind of bias is financial biases. Luckily there are multiple news orgs not beholden such things like Al-Jazeera, although its funded by the qatari government its practically independent with many awards and reporting representing the middle east, that's why they were able to stand against american lies in Iraq(to the point the U.S. requited Qatar to limit them), and truly cover the occupation in Palestine. Just don't trust their reporting about Qatar. Here a good video about Qatar and why Aljazeera exists https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKx7TPGttSk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKx7TPGttSk
Etrnl_President 3y ago
[dead]
PeterWhittaker 3y ago
Not terribly good, yet: searched for “Canada”, first story was about new ant fossils, second about storms sweeping US and Canada, the next several were about Dominion and Fox. So two “meh” and many “wtf”. Refinements remain to be made.
laomai 3y ago
Not a plug, but I subscribe to the newspaper.co. It’s kind cool in that it: - removes/neutralizes words that tends to flavor articles toward any particular position and focuses mainly on factual non-emotional type language. - sends blurbs out in a daily email (arguably editorial) - but generally tends to be well rounded important stories to keep you in the know about what’s going on It’s pretty cool, because unlike most new sources you don’t get a feeling anyone’s trying to railroad you down a particular way of thinking, but you feel like you’re just being presented with (more or less) statements about what is going on in the world.
eric-burel 3y ago
Honestly, I think "less-biased" would be more appropriate than "unbiased" and lead to less criticism. Otherwise cool project, I like the style of the generated illustrations.
devinprater 3y ago
After the skip to contents link, there are five unlabeled links, and after that is the news not found logo link. After the contact link, there is an unlabeled button, which is followed by the heading "NewsNotFound: An AI-Powered, Unbiased News Website". If these can be fixed, I think this could be a nice accessible site.
adfm 3y ago
It’s up to the individual to diversify and triangulate their news sources. Open source news and open source software are two different things, so keep that in mind when parsing this. It’s up to everyone to call out poor journalism when they see it. That includes omissions and conflations.
impool00100 3y ago
What if "Bias is inherent and unavoidable in all Human Thought & Experience" is the correct answer? How can any particular Individual be "unbiased"? It's impossible. Yet only an individual is "alive" and "living" the way it is legally/socially defined.
mfext 3y ago
I had family that worked at a news paper back before the boom of the internet, and something that most people nowadays don’t seem aware of is that even then, most news papers relied heavily on something called the Associated Press (AP). If you ever read a news paper and saw the symbols “(AP)”, this meant that the story was picked up from “the wire”. That wire was reference to telegraph technology from the 1800s, and it carried a plethora of stories submitted from associate news papers around the US. Given the distributed nature of “biases”, it is considered collectively to be “in the middle”. Going deeper in terms of analysis, in the US, the PBS news hour is the highest quality. Internationally, I read Reuters which seems similar to how the AP works, but I don’t have anything to compare it to.
newsnotfound 3y ago
PLEASE READ: I've read all comments and I realise that I'm presenting this project completely wrong. It's theoretically impossible to be 100% unbiased, and I'm currently misleading people by stating this across the site. However, it's not impossible, and quite easy, to be 'the most unbiased' news source. I believe the project can and will have a net-positive impact, by reducing the effects of sensationalism in the news. Even if NewsNotFound articles were only 90% neutral, that's 90% BETTER than reading the same story from a sensationalist source. This project has the potential to provide a platform for readers to digest the news in a 'less biased' way than anywhere else on the internet. Whether people want this, or prefer to read from biased sources because it's more emotive and relatable, is another issue and I think will stay a matter of preference. I will update all socials, whitepaper, etc. to reflect this and I apologise for my ignorance initially. There are a few other fundamental issues that people have pointed out, which I will try to fix over time. Thank you all for your feedback and insight. If anyone would like to contribute to the project, here is the GitHub repo: https://github.com/joshwallerr/newsnotfound https://github.com/joshwallerr/newsnotfound
- wolverine876 3y ago
  > However, it's not impossible, and quite easy, to be 'the most unbiased' news source. It's great that you are committed to providing less biased news. But AI is not less biased, and the first step is to realize that you are not magically less biased than all the other humans who produce news. Unless you see your own bias, you can't manage for it. In fact, I think a good number of journlists do that quite well. So do you, implicitly: Where will NewsNotFound get the 'facts' that it publishes, other than the journalists who go out, gather it, and report it? You can't witness it and report it yourself, beyond a tiny fraction of events.
- shortformblog 3y ago
  I encourage you to talk to some actual journalists. You will get better results in the end.
yencabulator 3y ago
> This prompt ensures that the article is completely unbiased and written from a neutral point of view. That comes across as very naive. "Ensures", really?

110 points by newsnotfound 3y ago

Imagine you could see into the minds of news reporters - their intentions, thought processes, and emotions when writing articles. This would allow us to hold reporters accountable for bias, misinformation, and sensationalism. Now imagine we could also dictate and control these thought processes and intentions, so as to ensure they aren't aligned with any particular viewpoint or political agenda. Unfortunately, this isn't possible in humans (yet). NewsNotFound proposes a solution to this problem, by removing the human middle-man between you and the news. With open-sourced code, anyone can now see exactly what goes on behind the scenes of article creation. This is the key to a trusted news company - complete transparency and the opportunity for anyone, anywhere to contribute. Whitepaper: https://newsnotfound.com/whitepaper/ https://newsnotfound.com/whitepaper/ GitHub Repo: https://github.com/joshwallerr/newsnotfound https://github.com/joshwallerr/newsnotfound

vladf 3y ago
A bit of an obscure reference for the anglocentric crowd, but Night Guard’s news in the Twilight World is exactly what your lede is imagining.
wolverine876 3y ago
In addition to the completely unfounded and false claim that AI is unbiased, there's this: > This is the key to a trusted news company - complete transparency and the opportunity for anyone, anywhere to contribute. Why do I want anyone, anywhere? What does that have to do with news? I want to hear from the best, not from the entire range.
- scubbo 3y ago
  Haven't you heard? The era of expertise is over! Anyone's opinion is exactly as valuable as anyone else's - in fact, the opinion of someone who is not an expert is _more_ valuable than that of an expert!
  - revelio 3y ago
    That's often true though. One way the media biases articles is by constant reliance on people presented as neutral experts but who don't satisfy the definition used by most people. Normally an expert is defined as someone who displays unusual skill or knowledge within a domain. The media tends to define it very differently, as "someone working for a public sector institution or NGO who claims to be an expert". No actual objective test of expertise is done before presenting that person's views as the final word on a topic and if the views of that person are being challenged by other people who know a lot but aren't institutionally affiliated, then that is just ignored entirely.
- rajin444 3y ago
  Who defines the best? Who defines unbiased? It all comes down to who you trust.
  - wolverine876 3y ago
    It takes real judgement and critical thought. It can't be done by algorithm. Sorry I have no easy answer for life.
- newsnotfound 3y ago
  This is referring to how the open-sourced code provides the freedom for anyone to criticise or correct the way the site works through contribution. Also, LLMs are biased, but through prompt engineering and other techniques, you can produce neutrally-written text. I realise now that my messaging with this project is off. What would more accurately explain the purpose of this project is to reduce the effects of sensationalism and indoctrination in the news. In other words, provide a platform for readers to make up their own opinions on news stories by filtering out the positive/negative language and putting as much focus on facts as possible. Even if NewsNotFound articles are only 90% neutral, that's 90% BETTER than reading the same story from a sensationalist source.
  - wolverine876 3y ago
    > through prompt engineering and other techniques, you can produce neutrally-written text Through thinking and editing, humans can (and often do) produce neutrally written text. What does AI change? Also, who decides what's neutral? The AI's programmers and operators - humans. Who decides if your AI's output is neutral - you do. Why couldn't you do the same with a human writer? > Even if NewsNotFound articles are only 90% neutral, that's 90% BETTER than reading the same story from a sensationalist source. Nothing is 100% sensationalistic. Anyway, I can (and do) find endless non-sensationalistic news. AI changes nothing; you are an editor (which is a good thing to be - I wish you well). But the idea that AI is somehow more neutral than humans, or that humans aren't in control here, is very dangerous. That is my concern.
shortformblog 3y ago
This idea punches down. Journalists work so hard to complete the work they do. They do not need this. And as noted elsewhere, AI is not inherently unbiased. In fact, one of the big problems with AI is that it introduces systemic bias, and understanding the role of fairness is very important here. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22916602/ai-bias-fairness-tradeoffs-artificial-intelligence https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22916602/ai-bias-fairness... I would also raise the point that journalism is actually moving past this idea of objectivity at all costs, where writers intentionally wear their point of view on their sleeve. It is no longer a negative to be purely unbiased. In fact, there are real concerns that objectivity leads to important questions not being asked or presented. (You might have heard the term “the view from nowhere.” That’s what I’m getting at.) To be clear, the work of journalists should not go unchallenged, but this feels like something you should spend time actually talking to some experts on journalism before you actually build it. The mindset you’re presenting here does not suggest you have.
- guywithahat 3y ago
  This doesn’t replace journalists, it’s just an AI driven link aggregator. That said as others have mentioned, LLVM’s are inherently biased through their training and this site only picks from moderate and left wing sites, bringing into question whether it could ever be unbiased.
  - Kye 3y ago
    Just trying to settle on a definition on left, moderate, etc would grind this thing to a halt. Most of what people call left is center by any view I would consider well-founded. Then there are places where what passes for center in the US would be far right. Not trying to classify would make choosing sources that are actually representative impossible unless the creator were operating under the illusion that unbiased sources are a thing.
    - guywithahat 3y ago
      Honestly I agree, it's a matter of perspective and even most self described left or right-wing outlets will have journalists who occasionally write articles that swing the other way. That said you can find the publishers they use in this list https://github.com/joshwallerr/newsnotfound/blob/main/scrape.py https://github.com/joshwallerr/newsnotfound/blob/main/scrape... if you want to make your own decision. Further I want to add I don't think this is a bad idea, I just think the idea of collecting "unbiased news", although desirable, is unfortunately impossible. The idea and model they've developed however may be very good.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

wolverine876 3y ago

Their agenda is evident in their claim that AI is unbiased. It's hard to believe that someone who works with AI to this degree would think for a moment that it is unbiased. It's an attempt to deceive the ignorant, for whatever purpose.

guywithahat 3y ago
They probably trained it until it agreed with their personal opinion of what is unbiased

svc0 3y ago

What could possibly go wrong?

HideousKojima 3y ago
I see a libel suit in the near future, at a minimum.

altairprime 3y ago

> The headline should use completely neutral and unbiased language. Aim to be factual, not opinionated. This sounds incredibly dull and lifeless. If you’re writing an encyclopedia, it’s fine. If you’re looking to be acquihired by Bloomberg Wire, it’s fine. But, modern chatbot aren’t capable of adhering to the restriction “factual”, and will hallucinate information just as readily as a human witness might during an interview. A few paragraphs of instruction don’t change the basic nature of multi-layer network synthesis. For that, you need a rigorous training and a network of peers ready to check you when you are led astray by your basic nature — and that requires having multiple viewpoints to mitigate groupthink. I mean no disrespect, but I hope this project fails.

flangola7 3y ago
"Neutral" language isn't even necessarily unbiased. "Leader of Nazi Germany Adolf Hitler committed horrible and evil actions" isn't "neutral" but it is a statement of clear objective fact. It's the same reason why passive voice writing such as "police-involved shooting" are problematic and biased.

not2b 3y ago

"By replacing the human middle-man with our AI-centric article creation process, we eliminate the potential for bias and ensure that all coverage remains impartial." AI LLMs inherit biases from their training data and the constraints the model builders added. There's no such thing as unbiased reporting; the usual way that this is attempted is to claim that the "unbiased" position is halfway between the positions of the two dominant political parties in some country, which might look like intense bias to someone in another country.

williamtrask 3y ago
This ideology of “replace corrupt institutions with tech” is at the center of SV ideology going back to the 70s. It’s as flawed then as it is now, but it occasionally has wins. There’s a great documentary on the long history of this idea in tech, both wins and losses, called “all watched over by machines of loving grace”. Brilliant documentary.
- asdfman123 3y ago
  That can also be framed as “erode legitimate institutions”
- revelio 3y ago
  It has some big and pretty frequent wins in that department compared to any other culture or industry.
  - JoeJonathan 3y ago
    Such as?
    - revelio 3y ago
      Most obviously the tech industry has disempowered the telco business. They are now just "dumb pipes", whereas once they wanted to be all singing all dancing content providers. Wikipedia replaced Britannica. Linux has largely replaced Microsoft. iTunes Store and Spotify took away a lot of the power that RIAA had over artists. If you want to focus purely on governmental institutions then encryption put intel agencies / corrupt police on the back foot and the digitization of processes especially payments has killed off a lot of low level corruption. What other industry has such a record?

BMc2020 3y ago

https://uk.linkedin.com/in/joshwallerr https://uk.linkedin.com/in/joshwallerr

zx8080 3y ago
The link requires logging in. Any quotes to be highlighted?
- BMc2020 3y ago
  you could join linkedin?

remram 3y ago

In addition to all the other comments pointing out how stupid this is, and how stupid your claims of non-bias are: Why pick such a stupid name? The Twitter handle is already taken by a parody account titled "Real FakeNews", that didn't tip you off as to how this name would be received?

Animats 3y ago

As expected, it has trouble with time and sequence. See "SpaceX Starship rocket system explodes during test flight".[1] "On Tuesday, SpaceX conducted an uncrewed sub-orbital test of its Starship rocket system in Texas. The spacecraft, which is designed to carry up to 100 astronauts to Mars, exploded within minutes of takeoff." "100 astronauts to Mars?" The launch was originally scheduled for Tuesday, April 18, but was delayed until Thursday, April 20. The story appears on NewsNotFound on Friday, April 21, as a current event. There needs to be a step in this process which constructs timelines. [1] https://newsnotfound.com/spacex-starship-rocket-system-explodes-during-test-flight/ https://newsnotfound.com/spacex-starship-rocket-system-explo...

klyrs 3y ago
I've read time and time again that there is no such thing as truth or fact. If the news is to be truly unbiased, it cannot have any basis in reality.

AiaAidan 3y ago

As someone who has worked in the media industry, I can tell you that the problem with unbiased news goes much deeper than simply presenting facts objectively. The very first step mentioned in your breakdown - scraping the latest headlines from publicly available news sites - is inherently biased, because it relies on a small selection of sources to determine what is considered newsworthy. But by whom? In reality, editors play a crucial role in shaping the news by deciding which events to cover and which to ignore, based on their own biases and interests. From my own experience, I can tell you that the most important news stories are often the ones that go unreported/underreported by most news sites. Unfortunately, there are also many insidious methods used to shape public opinion, such as distraction etc. But it all starts with the decisions made by editors about WHAT YOU, as a reader, should SEE and CARE about. So if we truly want to achieve unbiased news, we need to start by reevaluating the very definition of what is news.

numbsafari 3y ago
There is no such thing as unbiased news. Anyone claiming to be unbiased, rather than wearing their biases on their sleeves, is lying to you, or themselves, or they are just ignorant. Likely some combination of all three.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- paulddraper 3y ago
  Selection bias is insidious, and impossible to rid. By definition, news is things that are newsworthy. I.e. the most common things to tech receive coverage are the uncommon to things. If four people get shot over the weekend in Riverdale, not news. If four people get shot over the weekend in Beverly Hills, news. You don't even have to try to bias news for it be biased. (Now imagine if you try.)
  - numbsafari 3y ago
    Unless you live in Riverdale. Underreporting on violence in certain communities vs others is biased. Who determines what is uncommon vs common? Who decides the value of 4 people in Riverdale vs 4 people in Beverly Hills? Just going by “frequency of shootings” is a form of bias.

gfiorav 3y ago

This is interesting. I’d rather use the approach of Ground news: analyze everything published about a topic and let the reader decide.

JoshuaRedmond 3y ago

It seems to me that their view of bias is limited to a per-article approach. This could make it succeptible to broader narrative bias across stories - if, for example, the news sources are selectively only reporting on muggings when perpetrated by one race/nationality/immigration status/gender over another then it'll still give a false impression of attacks by those people, as it'll be completely blind to the lesser-reported cases.

t-3 3y ago

I'd rather a known and well-established bias than the algorithmic illusion of no bias. If I know the bias of my news provider, I can read them critically fairly easily. If I have to guess at the bias, that's much more difficult. I think a more useful approach would be to aggregate stories from different sources together and summarize the agreed and contested information and viewpoints. That would be a useful tool for evaluating news and identifying propaganda narratives.

annexrichmond 3y ago

It's not hard to discern bias within some article. Having more appropriate headlines is a good step, though. But I think the bigger issue is more about the coverage of stories. Outlets are certainly going to cater their audience. Example: maybe from sources you see more stories on white-on-black shootings, and in another source you see more black-on-white shootings. So which one is more "newsworthy"? That's where a lot of bias comes into play. > Step 1: For each category, we begin by scraping the latest headlines from publicly available news sites. That said, I'd like to know the categories and what sites are scraped, because there may be bias in the selection of such.

pessimizer 3y ago

> Step 2: Using sentence embedding, we identify any headlines that are related and choose these headlines as the subject of the article. The idea here is that if a story has multiple related headlines across different sources, it is more likely to be of greater importance than a story with none or only one related headline. This helps us determine which story to focus on and write an article about. Step 2 seems like a process to directly bias the inputs based on the popularity of each outlet. Or rather two processes, one hidden, because the outlets aren't selecting themselves. Why wouldn't this just be a wire service and press release detector?

Imnimo 3y ago

My favorite part is that step five allegedly ensures that the generated article is completely unbiased, and then the next step is immediately to run it through a bias checker. How do you write those sentences back to back and not realize something has gone awry?

claudiulodro 3y ago

"News organizations are terrible, so we take all of their work actually investigating, interviewing, and reporting about events, and run it through a GPT-powered article spinner without having to leave the house or do any original reporting" Doesn't really sound like a news company to me. Also, while I'm on the topic, "unbiased" news is an anti-pattern. A big part of the value of reporters is synthesizing and contextualizing events. Wikipedia current events[1] is basically unbiased news, but it has a tiny audience (and is still dependent on linking out to actual news organizations). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

Booktrope 3y ago

So, if this project were to be successful, it would replace news media as the outlet where people would look for news, thereby, reducing audience for the news media it's using as the source for it's information, which will provide less information due to reduced resources, and even more interestingly, get ever more sensationalist in trying to attract readers thereby increasing the bias of other media the AI depends on for information. Whee!

mellosouls 3y ago

Well there's been quite a backlash already, but I get the impression this is a well-motivated but perhaps a little naive attempt to do exactly what it says on the tin. Some of the criticisms are harsh but fair, yet I think that anybody who takes the time to read the "white paper" and acknowledge the admirable dedication to building in the open will see there is genuine potential and passion in this occasionally mad project. I love the energy and hope the (young) creators won't be too downhearted by the equal passion in some of the negative responses; a good indicator that the valid points about inherent AI and other bias have been listened to will be an updating of some of the language and soundbites used to sell this interesting project. On a more personal response, I thought the articles I tried were really pretty good in terms of being "free from bias", with the obvious negative corollary that they were rather dry. Bias is ok, it comes with passion often, it becomes a problem when it's not seen or overwhelms and controls. The articles were also quite long, which may not be appealing drained of emotion and creativity; I think the At A Glance summaries will prove to be the most valuable. The pictures were mad, I liked them though. Cool project overall, with the obvious issues noted. Best of luck going forward!

lucideer 3y ago
> a well-motivated but perhaps a little naive I normally try and be positive / open to flawed ideas or initiatives but in this particular case I think describing it as "a little naive" massively understates it. Well motivated it might be, the naivety is gargantuan. This isn't a nice idea with some flaws, this is a fundamentally misguided idea at its core. Utterly irredeemable. I wish the authors luck in that I hope they can step away & move on to something more worthwhile without being hurt or becoming defensive about criticism. Given the level of backlash in the comments here, its understandable that may be tough to do, but I really wouldn't want to encourage them to continue.

croes 3y ago

> completely neutral and unbiased That's either naive or a lie

nthdeui 3y ago

New snot found. Did their AI choose the url?

vivegi 3y ago

Their de-dupe filter needs some work. Duplicate articles on today's (Apr 22, 2023) front page: > World News: > Russian Warplane Accidentally Drops Bomb, Injuring Two in Belgorod April 21, 2023 > Russian Fighter Jet Accidentally Bombs City Near Ukraine Border April 21, 2023 > United States > US Supreme Court Blocks Restrictions on Abortion Pill Mifepristone April 22, 2023 > US Supreme Court Reviews Case on Mifepristone Restrictions April 21, 2023 > Alec Baldwin cleared of involuntary manslaughter charges in Halyna Hutchins shooting April 21, 2023 > Criminal Charges Dropped in Alec Baldwin On-Set Shooting Case April 21, 2023

SuzanSarong 3y ago

[flagged]

jonaharagon 3y ago

I assume this is satirical, but the other comments on this thread taking it seriously have me confused. This has already existed in the form of spam WordPress blogs[1] for years now anyways. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_spinning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_spinning

JPLeRouzic 3y ago
This site is built on Wordpress as it has a /wp-content/ folder. There are already article creation plugins for Wordpress: https://jasper.ai/ https://jasper.ai/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/mycurator/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/mycurator/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/bertha-ai-free/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/bertha-ai-free/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/content-bot/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/content-bot/

methou 3y ago

When enjoying good and insightful articles, I always assume that biases are deeply ingrained before an article was written. Author's educational background and affiliation plays a large role in how they write. Some of the biases are easy to spot and we can just laugh it out, but some of these are also unconscious bias. I would more likely to have an "AI" that identifies biases by analyzing the history of the authors, agencies, and related historical articles. It seems impossible to me as this is very aggressive on people who are working in the industry and a disrespect of their personhood. On the other hand, knowing what's happening in the world in a few sentenses is another thing, having GPT to check the bias and do some cross-ref checks is really sweet, after all I don't really care about most of the news.

bakugo 3y ago

Next time, please mention AI in the title so I can avoid clicking on it, thanks.

DangitBobby 3y ago

I really like the idea! I don't even mind that it hallucinates a little bit since I remember probably 10% of what I read and I'll read multiple sources for things that matter to me anyway. As for everyone commenting on bias: we all know there's no such thing as 0 bias.

langsoul-com 3y ago

The problem isn't the news sources. It's the incentives. A lot of those big media that people view as untrustworthy today were really good back then. But, eyeballs and ads result in emotional content and stories. Subscriptions means targeting a niche and always sticking with them, truth be dammed. Watch Netflix, their ads and subs business earns more than pure subscriptions. So now their incentives are you as a product, not good content.

endorphine 3y ago

I skimmed through the World section; it took 5 seconds to remember why I don't read the news. https://www.raptitude.com/2016/12/five-things-you-notice-when-you-quit-the-news/ https://www.raptitude.com/2016/12/five-things-you-notice-whe...

bedatadriven 3y ago

Yikes. There are many many issues here, but the images for the articles are the creepiest. Take a look at this article on conflict in Sudan: https://newsnotfound.com/conflict-in-sudan-causes-concern-for-neighboring-countries-and-us/ https://newsnotfound.com/conflict-in-sudan-causes-concern-fo... You could write a PhD on the biases absorbed into this image.

kseistrup 3y ago

Is there an overview over available RSS feeds?

asdfman123 3y ago

> The media landscape of today is one that is heavily polarised and sensationalised, Wow, this seems heavily biased

dermesser 3y ago

The idea that news could be "unbiased" is wrong. The fact that this is run by AI and called "unbiased" borders on ridiculous.

KaiserPro 3y ago

Reading the articles, you end up with vague sentences that are disjointed. Take this example: https://newsnotfound.com/new-seafood-and-italianinfluenced-restaurant-opens-in-norwich/ https://newsnotfound.com/new-seafood-and-italianinfluenced-r... this is a PR piece from a local news site. There is no critical thought as to why this is in the news. Not only is this not news, but it contains about 4 facts. The rest is vague useless information. If you want good quality news, you need to pay for it, from multiple sources. Contrary to popular opinion, bias is actually pretty easy to spot, its just that you need more than one source to find it. This approach just isn't going to help, it just strips away context from any bias and presents them as stand alone sentences.

endorphine 3y ago
Perhaps some human moderation as to which articles finally make it to the site would solve this?
- KaiserPro 3y ago
  That would be editorial. But it needs more than that, GPT isn't very good a summarisation. None of these summaries are useful, and there is nothing stopping someone filling it with bias.

tanyajenkins1 3y ago

[flagged]

wesleywt 3y ago

The only news you should be paying attention to is local news. But the internet has destroyed that. Now we just have hateful news.

throw22423 3y ago
>The only news you should be paying attention to is local news It's time to completely obliterate this meme. Local news are not relevant. They never were, they never will be. Let's see what my local newspaper has to say for today: - weather today (probably less acurate than other sources) - local grandma is about to turn 103 - car crash in midtown (nobody was injured) - motorcyclist crashed (minor injuries) - the results of a soccer match nobody cares about - some section of the park will be renewed - mishmash of national news and international news (copy pasted) Even if someone you care about has an accident, you'll find out before you check this. The only thing would be a site that keeps track of the city's history or something like that. That and ads for local businesses... and obituaries.

watsonjs 3y ago

The two sentences in the article that tells me this will be a failure: “ Once we have a list of related headlines, we then use GPT-3 to generate a list of facts, not opinions, that are present within each of those headline’s respective articles.” “ We then run the article through a “bias checker,” which uses sentiment analysis to rate the sentiment polarity of the generated article.”

Buhljingo 3y ago
+1 Can't wait for GPT-3 to start disguising opinions as facts
antegamisou 3y ago
Couldn't be more textbook overzealous HN endeavor.

gadders 3y ago

I'm politically biassed but this company does a reasonable job of being un-biassed and even-handed. It's not the Economist but if you just a want a few interesting stories per day you could do worse: https://www.rocanews.com/ https://www.rocanews.com/

atoav 3y ago

Is it unbiased in the sense of the word, or in the sense that the US-far right uses the word where everything that doesn't support the far right narratives has a "liberal bias"? (meaning media that doesn't fact check their lies and doesn't tell facts they dislike) If you tell a chatbot trained on the internet to be unbiased how do you know which definition it will apply?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

crispyambulance 3y ago

Well, it's not news, the articles are insufferable. But it's an admirable experiment. Impressive that Josh Waller (that's the name on the github repo) went all the way with this. My initial impression was that it is some kind of satire but he seems to be playing it straight. If that's the case then I just don't get the preoccupation with "unbiased". Journalism always has a bias at some level. Whether it becomes a problem that needs to be addressed is a matter of degree and intent. I would even say that streams of "just facts" without context, without some point of view are uninteresting to a reader unless they're performing certain kinds of tasks which benefit from such a stream-- but that is very different from "news".

dotancohen 3y ago

Sounds like a great idea, but much of the bias in news is by way of lies of omission. For a recent example, last month BBC ran the headline "British woman, daughters, killed on road north of Foobar city". From the headline, one might never come to the conclusion that their car was shot by a passing vehicle, which then turned around and returned to shoot some more even after their vehicle crashed. And even the accompanying article did not make that clear until very deep in the article - and even then omitted much context. Similarly, a few days later security forces went to arrest the perpetrators of the attack, and were themselves attacked with Molotov cocktails and large stones thrown from a high floor. They returned fire, and one of the attackers, a 15 year old boy, was killed. The BBC headline read "SpecificCountry soldiers murder 15 year old Foobar boy". No mention was made of the attack on the security forces, nor of the attack on the car to which the security forces were responding. At least, not in the first few paragraphs that I read, which mostly concerned themselves with other incidents in which Foobar citizens were hurt or killed by SpecificCountry forces, with absolutely no context. Nothing published was an outright lie. But the omission paints a bias by itself. How could this AI-powered "unbiased news company" form an unbiased version of events, when the relevant information is not even provided by the sources?

clarkmcc 3y ago

The news sources that I trust the least are the news sources that claim to be “unbiased”. I tend to read a variety of news sources that claim to be biased and then mentally account for that bias. Also, your site is down…

denton-scratch 3y ago

"Unbiased" news is impossible; the reporter has biases, the editor has biases, the publisher has biases; which they may or may not be aware of. The biases they don't know about are the most insidious. So I'm most suspicious of sources that brag about their objectivity. I prefer sources that wear their bias on their sleeve (provided they're actually news sources, and not overt propaganda or gutter tabloids).

ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
Yes, but it's perfectly valid to attempt to minimise biases. Simple things such as fact-checking and not using loaded language can go a long way to becoming more neutral.
- idopmstuff 3y ago
  But that's not what it says - it says it's unbiased, and leading with that doesn't exactly scream self-awareness about the problem at hand.
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  Simple things that you mention are great. But probably the nastiest kind of bias is the choice of what news to deliver in the first place; it's hard to detect bias in a news source from what it isn't reporting.
- remram 3y ago
  AI can't fact-check, only correlate sources with its limited understanding.
grumbel 3y ago
I'd much rather have one that tried to be objective, than just one that embraces their bias. The later one will always be terrible at reporting. The former at least has a chance of being good. Seriously, the bar is not exactly high. Start with telling me where and when something happen, make a time line if it's a series of events. Tell me who is involved. Don't dress it in flowery language, make it as simple as possible, make it a list if you can. Do proper follow ups, not just event based reporting (i.e. tell me why the airplane crashed when the report is out, don't waste too much time with "we don't know anything, but here is a picture of smoke"). And of course list your sources (i.e. don't report on science paper without even linking it). So far Wikipedia is the only one that gets somewhat close to this ideal. Almost everything else is just attention seeking clickbait.

kajaktum 3y ago

Unbiased news is an unsound business strategy. It actively is against human demand (despite needing it).

mrmckizzle 3y ago

I like to use https://ground.news/ https://ground.news/. At least it attempts to show you what the biases are based on political leanings.

jacooper 3y ago

Personally I think the most dangerous kind of bias is financial biases. Luckily there are multiple news orgs not beholden such things like Al-Jazeera, although its funded by the qatari government its practically independent with many awards and reporting representing the middle east, that's why they were able to stand against american lies in Iraq(to the point the U.S. requited Qatar to limit them), and truly cover the occupation in Palestine. Just don't trust their reporting about Qatar. Here a good video about Qatar and why Aljazeera exists https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKx7TPGttSk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKx7TPGttSk

Etrnl_President 3y ago

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PeterWhittaker 3y ago

Not terribly good, yet: searched for “Canada”, first story was about new ant fossils, second about storms sweeping US and Canada, the next several were about Dominion and Fox. So two “meh” and many “wtf”. Refinements remain to be made.

laomai 3y ago

Not a plug, but I subscribe to the newspaper.co. It’s kind cool in that it: - removes/neutralizes words that tends to flavor articles toward any particular position and focuses mainly on factual non-emotional type language. - sends blurbs out in a daily email (arguably editorial) - but generally tends to be well rounded important stories to keep you in the know about what’s going on It’s pretty cool, because unlike most new sources you don’t get a feeling anyone’s trying to railroad you down a particular way of thinking, but you feel like you’re just being presented with (more or less) statements about what is going on in the world.

eric-burel 3y ago

Honestly, I think "less-biased" would be more appropriate than "unbiased" and lead to less criticism. Otherwise cool project, I like the style of the generated illustrations.

devinprater 3y ago

After the skip to contents link, there are five unlabeled links, and after that is the news not found logo link. After the contact link, there is an unlabeled button, which is followed by the heading "NewsNotFound: An AI-Powered, Unbiased News Website". If these can be fixed, I think this could be a nice accessible site.

adfm 3y ago

It’s up to the individual to diversify and triangulate their news sources. Open source news and open source software are two different things, so keep that in mind when parsing this. It’s up to everyone to call out poor journalism when they see it. That includes omissions and conflations.

impool00100 3y ago

What if "Bias is inherent and unavoidable in all Human Thought & Experience" is the correct answer? How can any particular Individual be "unbiased"? It's impossible. Yet only an individual is "alive" and "living" the way it is legally/socially defined.

mfext 3y ago

I had family that worked at a news paper back before the boom of the internet, and something that most people nowadays don’t seem aware of is that even then, most news papers relied heavily on something called the Associated Press (AP). If you ever read a news paper and saw the symbols “(AP)”, this meant that the story was picked up from “the wire”. That wire was reference to telegraph technology from the 1800s, and it carried a plethora of stories submitted from associate news papers around the US. Given the distributed nature of “biases”, it is considered collectively to be “in the middle”. Going deeper in terms of analysis, in the US, the PBS news hour is the highest quality. Internationally, I read Reuters which seems similar to how the AP works, but I don’t have anything to compare it to.

newsnotfound 3y ago

PLEASE READ: I've read all comments and I realise that I'm presenting this project completely wrong. It's theoretically impossible to be 100% unbiased, and I'm currently misleading people by stating this across the site. However, it's not impossible, and quite easy, to be 'the most unbiased' news source. I believe the project can and will have a net-positive impact, by reducing the effects of sensationalism in the news. Even if NewsNotFound articles were only 90% neutral, that's 90% BETTER than reading the same story from a sensationalist source. This project has the potential to provide a platform for readers to digest the news in a 'less biased' way than anywhere else on the internet. Whether people want this, or prefer to read from biased sources because it's more emotive and relatable, is another issue and I think will stay a matter of preference. I will update all socials, whitepaper, etc. to reflect this and I apologise for my ignorance initially. There are a few other fundamental issues that people have pointed out, which I will try to fix over time. Thank you all for your feedback and insight. If anyone would like to contribute to the project, here is the GitHub repo: https://github.com/joshwallerr/newsnotfound https://github.com/joshwallerr/newsnotfound

wolverine876 3y ago
> However, it's not impossible, and quite easy, to be 'the most unbiased' news source. It's great that you are committed to providing less biased news. But AI is not less biased, and the first step is to realize that you are not magically less biased than all the other humans who produce news. Unless you see your own bias, you can't manage for it. In fact, I think a good number of journlists do that quite well. So do you, implicitly: Where will NewsNotFound get the 'facts' that it publishes, other than the journalists who go out, gather it, and report it? You can't witness it and report it yourself, beyond a tiny fraction of events.
shortformblog 3y ago
I encourage you to talk to some actual journalists. You will get better results in the end.

yencabulator 3y ago

> This prompt ensures that the article is completely unbiased and written from a neutral point of view. That comes across as very naive. "Ensures", really?