2 ms·

Figuring out that data is faulty is one thing There is still no possible way that a journalist can arrive at correct information, no matter how good, if they o

• simonw 2y ago
  That's what (good) journalism is: the craft of hunting down sources of information, figuring out how accurate and reliable they are and piecing tougher as close to the truth as you can get. A friend of mine is an investigative reporter for a major publication. They once told me that an effective trick for figuring out what's happening in a political story is to play different sources off against each other - tell one source snippets of information you've got from another source to see if they'll rebut or support it, or if they'll leak you a new detail because what you've got already makes them look bad. Obviously these sources are all inherently biased and flawed! They'll lie to you because they have an agenda. Your job is to figure out that agenda and figure out which bits are true. The best way to confirm a fact is to hear about it from multiple sources who don't know who else you are talking to. That's part of how the human intelligence side of journalism works. This is why I think journalists are particularly well suited to dealing with LLMs - human sources lie and mislead and hallucinate to them all the time already. They know how to get (as close as possible) to the truth.