Re:Senators Demand Google Hand Over Internal Memo Urging Goo...
by tyrust on Monday October 15, 2018 @01:21PM
(#18221634)
>I await robot news that is a bulleted list of facts.
Interesting that you mention this, I'm not convinced that this will be a silver bullet. A couple of concerns that come to mind:
1. Something must bridge the robot to the physical world. The selection of which facts to include and exclude in this data source can create bias.
2. From the data source, the robot then would make its own decision about to to present facts, presumably performing some filtration of its own. Such a robot can have bias [0].
To be clear, I definitely agree that robojournalism could be an improvement. But we can't forget how it works and how it could be manipulated.
[0] - For example http://blog.conceptnet.io/posts/2017/how-to-make-a-racist-ai...
That an article needs a "tone", and that it's right/wrong based on how big of a deal the reader thinks it is, is the issue. I await robot news that is a bulleted list of facts. We could argue about fact selection/placement, but I'll take that over arguing a particular organization's collective side of the bed they wake up on.
To your point, we disagree there wrt internal discussions of disclosure. What will be real scary is when there is a chilling effect to even performing rational discussion around these things. There is no such thing as disclose all, and when there is no such thing as talking about it either, you'll wish these rules were codified in law instead of applied selectively to issues you are ok with.