> Respectfully disagree. You're right in principle if you build a tool like that for yourself. But since this is Open Source, you have to take into account that people who don't understand that will use the tool as well and then use that as "evidence" in whatever arguments they're having with someone.

Respectfully disagree with you respectfully disagreeing - this line of thinking can be used to argue against almost any information sharing.

i.e. Should we stop governments releasing statistics that might be misinterpreted by an uninformed press? Should we stop open access to medical journals because untrained readers might use them for incorrect medical advice? Should we stop companies releasing public annual reports, because investing consumers that are untrained in reading financial documents might misinterpret them?

I'm just stating that I think the data is likely a priori garbage (without a lot of sanitizing work), in the hope that that message spreads faster than the use of the tool. I think having that discussion is both important and preferable to censorship.

Actually, there is a recent ~"law"? (discussed on HN) that essentially forbids publishing research that may be misinterpreted by the pronoun people (i.e., any research can be banned).

Do you have a link / source for this?

Hopefully they read one sentence about what the tool does before using it. If they don't, their arguments will be weak due to their own sloppiness in research, which doesn't seem like a new problem.

the thing is, people who want to use this for defamation don't have an incentive to sanitize the data - the message might stick around regardless of whether it has any merit (we've seen this happening even at the most publicly scrutinized national level, imagine how much fewer defenses smaller players have)

Defamation is definitely one problem with this tool. Once there is “evidence”, it can be (ab)used without consequence by someone, because they can simply point at the tool output. If the output is usually “good enough”, it will provide an alibi for their actions: “I didn’t make a mistake, the computer did.”

Nobody who bothers to check what the tool does will be swayed by this. If someone wants to make shit up, and their audience will not bother to spend 30 seconds looking at their "sources", they could just write a script that outputs whatever they wanted and then point at that script.

You are putting a lot of faith in people to do that diligence. Most people will take the “evidence” at face value. And yes, people do write scripts to generate material to defame or hurt others.

You're making my point. People take evidence at face value, so a program like Maigret makes no difference. Why bother using Maigret when you can just make stuff up?

Frankly, </Hikaru>

> But since this is Open Source,

You can add the functionality you would like it to have, and share with the others.

For more fine tuned solutions, there is always a DoD contractor available near you :-)