3 ms·
Whilst chasing after "objective truth" is a philosophical problem, it's clear that some statements are more correct and true than others. News articles are oft
by ndsipa_pomu 7mo ago
Whilst chasing after "objective truth" is a philosophical problem, it's clear that some statements are more correct and true than others.
News articles are often biased, but most of the time, the bias is from the choice of what is reported and choosing specific language to push an interpretation (e.g. reporting road traffic collisions as "accidents" to downplay them or depersonalise them by stating "car hit tree" rather than "car driven into tree"). The problem with some LLM outputs is that it's not just bias, but clearly incorrect such as recommending putting glue onto pizzas.
- lovelearning 7mo agoI agree about how these biases happen. However, omission and downplaying can also be harmful just like hallucinations. One redeeming quality of LLMs is that we can ask the same LLM to fact check its previous answer and they do tend to correct most of their mistakes themselves. Something we can't do with media sources, and usually don't try either. LLMs along with existing sources can be good complementary tools for getting even closer to an objective truth than relying on either one by itself.
- ndsipa_pomu 7mo agoI disagree as hallucinations can be drastically far more harmful or misleading than bias. The problem as I see it is that LLMs perform a type of lossy knowledge compression. Also, the data on which they're trained will typically be the biased articles, so they're unlikely to be any better and very likely worse as they will encode the biases. I don't really see LLMs as being complementary tools as they're more of a summation/averaging tool - like comparing an original painting with a heavily compressed JPEG of that painting. (Of course, having access to a huge library of JPEGs is often more useful than just owning a single painting)