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Posted by 12_throw_away 1 day ago

Law360 mandates reporters use AI "bias" detection on all stories(www.niemanlab.org)
58 points | 77 commentspage 2
pkilgore 21 hours ago|
What I do not understand is this top-down mandate that people use specific tools.

Mandate productivity, mandate quality; the tools will be adopted if they are sharp.

But elevating the way work is performed above the work itself? Weird.

mike_hearn 9 hours ago||
It's because the executives don't trust the journalists to do the work properly.

The article says that explicitly: customers have complained about the quality of the work. The business owners view unhappy customers as a threat to their business, and so have introduced automation to make product quality higher and more even. The workers are unhappy because they don't want to be automated away and resent the implication that their artisanally hand-crafted articles aren't good enough. This is a very old story that's been going on for hundreds of years. There's nothing special about it.

lovich 21 hours ago||
I don't know how you read this article and came away that they were merely trying to force adoption of AI tools.

This is LexisNexis requiring all of their workers run their output through a censorship machine to comply with the whims of the current administration. It has zero benefits to the workers so of course they have to mandate it

iFire 20 hours ago||
Does this mean automated censorship by AI "bias" detection?
add-sub-mul-div 23 hours ago||
"Bias" and "narrative" have become meaningless words that people use when encountering ideas they don't like. Or when they believe that neither side could ever be right about an issue, that it's virtuous for a stance to be in the middle of the current Overton window.
MangoToupe 22 hours ago||
Even presenting a given problem as "merely" two-sided is often disingenuous.

For instance, if you "just" look at abortion, trans rights, and immigration, you may assume the two parties in america present diametrically-opposed groups of people (...which is even itself quite debatable). But this is only because the two parties don't differ much (or at least, don't bother to platform enough to evaluate) on most topics politics could be about.

Gormo 22 hours ago|||
I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to presume that more valid positions are likely to be found closer to the midpoint of the current Overton window. I suspect that as a matter of Bayesian probability, more extreme positions are more likely to be wrong.
ElevenLathe 22 hours ago|||
The whole premise of the Overton window is that it does not represent the full spectrum of opinions on some issues, which is unchanging, but rather some socially constructed window onto that spectrum, which does change. Assuming that the midpoint is probably correct is equivalent to saying that any change from the status quo is probably bad. Is that what you really mean?
const_cast 13 hours ago||||
Based on a gander at history, I doubt it. Usually one side is actually right and it seems very obvious now but was not obvious at the time. And, typically, the moderate or midpoint position seem incredibly stupid now. Like the 3/5ths compromise.
MangoToupe 22 hours ago|||
On which topic? Saying the average person can't decide between two viewpoints on any given topic seems ridiculous.
nh23423fefe 23 hours ago||
I don't like this idea. Bias is lying to advance your position. Narrative is telling a story to persuade instead of making an argument to persuade.
JoshTriplett 22 hours ago||
While I'd favor defining words rather than claiming they're meaningless, those aren't accurate definitions.

"Narrative" in this context is more like "attempting to steer the current discourse by making connections among things and positioning them as part of a coherent story", which can be positive (if the result is accurate and reasonable and helps people better understand what's going on) or negative (if it's spin or manufacturing consent). It's "narrative" to say "you should be afraid of X, it's the cause of all your problems". It's also "narrative" to say "here are the five different things we're currently doing to improve Y, and how they tie together into a coherent picture".

Also, bias would be easier to deal with if it were always "lying", or if it advanced a coherent position. It's much broader than that.

croes 19 hours ago||
Who watches the watchers?
throwaway984393 22 hours ago|
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