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It's better in all those metrics. Go on X. Claims are being fact checked and annotated in real time by an algorithm that finds cases where ideologically oppose
by qcnguy 8mo ago
It's better in all those metrics.
Go on X. Claims are being fact checked and annotated in real time by an algorithm that finds cases where ideologically opposed people still agree on the fact check. People can summon a cutting edge LLM to evaluate claims on demand. There is almost no gatekeeping so discussions show every point of view, which is fair and curious.
Compare to, I dunno, the BBC. The video you see might not even be real. If you're watching a conservative politician maybe 50 minutes were spliced out of the middle of a sentence and the splice was hidden. You hear only what they want you to hear and they gatekeep aggressively. Facts are not checked in real time by a distributed vote, LLMs are not on hand to double check their claims.
AI and social media are working well together. The biggest problem is synthetic video. But TV news has that problem too, it turns out. Just because you hear someone say some words doesn't mean that was what they actually said. So they're doing equally badly in that regard.
- biophysboy 8mo agoAs I said, AI is better than social media. AI is trained on and references original sources, which makes it better than reading and believing random posts.
- chrisjj 8mo agoOriginal sources include random posts.
- johnnyanmac 8mo agoAI is also trained on "random posts". Google made an 11 figure deal with Reddit for this sake. The biggest factor of social media is being able to curate personalities you go to for whatever reason. If you care about reason you will find the reasonable writers. This also enables disinformation, but people looking for anything to fit what they want to hear wouldn' fo towards the reasonable writers anyway.
- mattnewton 8mo agoLast time I went on X my feed which I curated from ML contributors and a few politicians had multiple white nationalist memes, and engagement slop. Fact checks frequently are added after millions of impressions. I am sure there are very smart well meaning people working on it but it certainly doesn’t feel better than the BBC to me. At least I know that’s state media of the UK and when something is published I see the same article as other people.
- HaZeust 8mo ago>"but it certainly doesn’t feel better than the BBC to me" BBC was cutting-edge for creating and fostering methodologies that went on to become most of the "impartial reporting" practices from journalists. So, even if it's not feeling any "better" than BBC, that's still a pretty good step in the right direction!
- mattnewton 8mo agoThe parent poster was saying X was better than the BBC, I certainly wouldn't have picked that one, but it's likely because they get their news from conservative outlets outraged by the recutting of Trump's speech on January 6th.
- qcnguy 8mo agoThat phrasing sounds like you're not yourself outraged by it. It wouldn't be surprising given the institutional attitudes seen at the BBC (and Channel 4 which got caught doing something even worse) - clearly, leftists have decided that framing politicians and publishing entirely fake news is acceptable if it's to attack right wing people. Anyone who knows about that event and is still watching the BBC afterwards is saying they don't care about the truth of their own beliefs. Dangerous stuff.
- johnnyanmac 8mo ago>So, even if it's not feeling any "better" than BBC, that's still a pretty good step in the right direction! The step in the direction of decentralized filter bubbles isoating society? With no channels to hold info accountable and checked/upfated for accuracy?
- HaZeust 8mo agoGP made a pretty good case for X being a good-faithed attempt at a new distributed structure for mass media that at least TRIES to have conflicting viewpoints or objectivist "fact checks", even if it occasionally misses the mark. I was VERY early on the "hate-Elon" bandwagon and even earlier on not being an active Twitter/X user (search my username). In a post-Fairness Doctrine world, what else would satisfy you?
- throwaw12 8mo agoX is not a good representative to free speech. 1. It censors some topics. Just for fun, try to write something about Israel-Gaza, or try to praise Russia and compare the likes/views with your other posts and over the next week observe how these topics is impacting your overall reach even in other topics. 2. X amplifies your interests, which is not objectively true, so if you are interested in conspiracy or Middle East, it pushes you those topics, but others see different things. Although its showing you something you are interested in, in reality its isolating you in your bubble.
- qcnguy 8mo ago1. Are those topics being censored? You don't seem to know that is true, you're just making assumptions about what reach should be. They open sourced the ranking algorithm and just refreshed it - can you find any code that'd suppress these topics? 2. The media also amplifies people's interests which is why it focuses on bad news and celebrity gossip. How is this unique to social media? Why is it even bad? I wouldn't want to consume any form of media that deliberately showed me boring and irrelevant things.
- chrisjj 8mo ago> Facts are not checked in real time by a distributed vote Nor could they be. We don't even have the tech for trustworthy electronic elections.
- watwut 8mo agoBBC for all its faults is definitely better then Musks X when it comes to truth. > Claims are being fact checked and annotated in real time by an algorithm that finds cases where ideologically opposed people still agree on the fact check. People can summon a cutting edge LLM to evaluate claims on demand. There is almost no gatekeeping so discussions show every point of view, which is fair and curious. Every single sentence in this paragraph is a lie.