Is Patrick Soon-Shiong, the owner of the Los Angeles Times, the latest tech billionaire to be consumed by the broke mind virus?
Patrick Soon-Shiong, the owner of the Los Angeles Times, has announced plans to incorporate an artificial intelligence-powered “bias meter” into the newspaper’s coverage.
....The “bias meter”, Soon-Shiong said, will be integrated into articles so that “somebody could understand, as they read it, that the source of the article has some level of bias”.... “And what we need to do is not have what we call confirmation bias, and then that story automatically, the reader can press a button and get both sides of that exact same story based on that story and then give comments,” he added.
Let's see if I understand this. Soon-Shiong apparently thinks his own reporters are presenting only one side of the story, so he's introducing a tool that will—what? Produce a competing story? Merely rate quoted sources on his bias meter? Provide links to the "other side"?
It's not clear. But this sure seems like a peculiar way to tell the public you don't trust your own staff. I for one can't wait to see it in action.
Can't wait for that "German guard's perspective" on the Holocaust story
In a perverse way, I respect Soon-Shiong more than the soulless grinders at Sinclair or the other outfits turning legacy media into propaganda mills.
Dude is just letting it all hang out - openly disrespecting his editors, reporters and readers all at the same time.
Bezos showed a shadow of contrition in that open letter after he sold the WaPo out. Soon-Shiong just doesn't give a shit.
Bezos spent a couple years prodding it’s employees to grow its online presence, and in one swoop, and against the advice of the editor he hired, he undid all the work they did and then lied about it.
Bezos is just injecting hallucination into his paper...
https://gizmodo.com/jeff-bezoss-washington-post-launches-an-ai-product-after-losing-250k-subscribers-2000521864
In order to determine "bias" one must anchor on some supposedly unbiased position. Does this idiot owner really think AI can do that? Moreover, this really is just taking the absurd MSM levels of "bothsiderism" journalism to an even more absurd extreme. Imagine an article describing the earth as a 3 dimensional sphere and saying that people who think otherwise are ignorant. What does the AI do with that article? How about one saying that Trump's proposed tariffs will increase domestic prices? etc etc.
"Does this idiot owner really think .."
He is not an idiot. He is trying to implement Chinese like censorship, and uses gobbledygookto cover it up.
I think he's been watching too many of those Apple commercials...AI will ;proofread it, the rewrite it to sound nice.
I guess they've added a wing nut option.
It must be a third party deal in the fashion of an anarcho-syndicalist commune where turns are taken to act as a sort of executive officer for the week and any decision of that officer would have to be ratified at a special biweekly meeting by a simple majority in the case of purely internal affaires or by a two-thirds majority in the case of determining bias on any article published on a controversial issue.
This and the preceding post are both about shifting the Overton window, aka brainwashing. I wonder where the pundits are who made a huge deal about brainwashing in authoritarian regimes abroad.
Patrick Soon-Shiong
Elon Musk
David Sacks
Peter Thiel
Clearly, our immigration system needs reform if we're letting in so many billionaires from South Africa who are eating the minds of our children (along with many others who, unfortunately, vote).
There should be no place for a guy like Soon-Shiong in American journalism. His plan to adjust for "bias" is in effect an attack on the idea of "facts" and "truth." It sadly seems to be the default consensus of many in "news" today that there is no such thing as objectivity. Information is a war between competing points of view, and whoever has the biggest bullhorn wins.
If there were ever a recipe for "both-siderism", this is it.
“somebody could understand, as they read it, that the source of the article has some level of bias”
I like that idea. When the bias is MAGA, the text gradually becomes redder, and if it's Democratic propaganda (whatever that might be) the text shifts to blue. If it's Deep State propaganda, typeface is italic. Bold for anything that Elon Musk approves of. Underline reserved for special instances. And ALL CAPS for whatever claims Fox News is hyping.
Time for me to cancel my LA Times subscription. (I had just resubscribed for the first time in years right before the non-endorsement(!), but couldn't bring myself to cancel two days after I re-subscribed.) Like WaPo, the LA Times needs to go to the dustbin of history apparently, no thanks to their billionaire owners.
The list of papers worthy of subscription just gets shorter and shorter. Forbes is little but Bitcoin shilling lately, The Economist down the tubes too...
It is pretty easy to correct bias in the MSM; if you quote a Republican, and to a much lessor extent a Democrat, you probably misinformed your readers *UNLESS* you immediately follow that quote with a statement from somebody that actually is a subject matter expert. The LA Times, NYT, and WaPo are really good at the first step, they almost never perform the second step.
A few days ago a search turned up a Newsweek article. It had a bias meter at the bottom. As a non-subscriber I could rate it unbiased, but I couldn't comment. So I was unable to ask what the ... was this, didn't they know if they were biasing their stuff?
He's an idiot and he should be publicly shamed, if it's possible for such a thing to happen to a billionaire these days.
What the Times needs instead is an AI powered publisher. The regular I one is pretty stupid.