[HN Gopher] Law360 mandates reporters use AI "bias" detection on...
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Law360 mandates reporters use AI "bias" detection on all stories
Author : 12_throw_away
Score : 44 points
Date : 2025-07-02 18:31 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.niemanlab.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.niemanlab.org)
| jerf wrote:
| Today, somewhere in the world, some people made an event occur.
| Some people approved and some people disapproved. It impacted
| some people more than others, which some people think may be a
| bad thing, although others think that it may have been a good
| thing. The event stemmed from many past events, which many people
| have various strong opinions about. Politicians made various
| strong statements about the event, as well as a few celebrities.
| The future impact of the event is under debate, though experts
| agree that the situation is complicated and people should
| probably think about it very carefully before coming to
| conclusions. It is unclear what the market will do in response to
| this event.
| Herring wrote:
| > Party A: wants to abolish slavery
|
| > Party B: wants way more slaves
|
| > Media: record low percentage of Americans satisfied with
| agriculture today!
|
| Impartiality is very important.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| In unrelated news:
|
| General Sherman Begins Demolition in Georgia For Urgently
| Needed Infrastructure Projects
|
| I mean, you could ask ChatGPT or something to make some
| pretty braindead impartial newspaper headlines about, like,
| the Holocaust or slavery. I guess you're right, in some
| cases, impartiality will come off as a bit ridiculous to the
| common sense segment of society.
| nxobject wrote:
| Welp, I've read every newspaper article - at least I have an
| excuse not to read the news anymore for my sanity.
| encom wrote:
| Breaking News: Some Bullshit Happening Somewhere:
| <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9U4Ha9HQvMo>
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| "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.
| nh23423fefe wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Gormo wrote:
| 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.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| On which topic? Saying the average person can't decide
| between two viewpoints on _any given topic_ seems ridiculous.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| 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?
| MangoToupe wrote:
| 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.
| owisd wrote:
| The problem with trying too hard to neutrally report both sides
| of a story is that's not unbiased either, it's just biased in
| favour of the side that can lie the most convincingly.
| wredcoll wrote:
| I am so, so tired, of "both sides" reporting. How about just
| report the facts instead?
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| It's a rare issue that you can't swing both ways by selecting
| the subset of facts to focus on. Attention doesn't just
| matter, it's all that matters. This is why adversarial forums
| are so important even if they so often degenerate into
| shouting past one another: each side has the ability and
| motivation to bring its strongest facts, so they are at least
| _present_ in the discussion, even if debate tactics add tons
| of noise and confirmation bias dampens the effects.
| wredcoll wrote:
| Yes, in principle, but I object to "reporters" merely
| quoting people instead of attempting to actually verify if
| what they said has any basis in reality.
|
| That being said, I'm not sure how much this actually
| matters, trump seems to pretty comprehensively prove that
| people would rather hear lies, even if they know they are
| lies.
| an0malous wrote:
| Because there's basically no such thing and choosing which
| facts you report is a huge source of bias anyway
| kube-system wrote:
| Nearly all political issues are rooted in philosophical
| differences of opinion. "The facts" are merely the icing on
| the cake that various factions use to lure people to their
| ideology. Factual reporting is better than direct opinion
| reporting, but both are inherently interpreted by people in
| the context of the Overton window.
| wredcoll wrote:
| You're not wrong, but very often those philosophical
| differences are being masked by lies.
|
| I don't want to get into the gory details in this tiny text
| box, but any number of current fear based political
| campaigns use wildly "distorted" facts to bolster their
| arguments, and most of the time reporters just blindly
| repeat whatever the person says without attempting to
| verify it.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| First you'd have to get people to agree on what a fact is,
| let alone what the facts are.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Timeless quote:
|
| > If Jimmy Allred says it's raining, and W. Lee O'Daniel says it
| isn't raining, Texas newspapermen quote them both, and don't look
| out the window to see which is lying, and to tell the readers
| what the truth is at the moment.
|
| https://quoteinvestigator.com/2023/11/14/rain-look/
|
| If an AI tool, or for that matter a meddling editor, says a
| headline is "framing the action as unprecedented in a way that
| might subtly critique the administration", the correct response
| is "yes, that was the idea".
| sandwichsphinx wrote:
| reminds me of the essay "Politics and the English Language"
| George Orwell wrote in 1946, it's a good read
| zaphar wrote:
| I don't think most reporting bias takes the form of incorrect
| facts. It takes the form of picking which facts to share driven
| by the facts that matter the most to the particular reporter
| sharing them. This results in slanted coverage even if
| technically it's "factual".
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Take a look at the headline flagged in the article, which the
| tool flagged as "framing the action as unprecedented in a way
| that might subtly critique the administration". The headline
| is factually accurate, and the facts are not cherry-picked.
|
| Yes, some reporting is biased. But some reporting is simply
| _accurately_ reporting damaging information, and "biased" is
| a way of attacking that without addressing the substance of
| the problem.
| zaphar wrote:
| I agree that article's headline is pretty factual nor are
| the facts cherry-picked. But "some reporting is biased" is
| heavily understating the problem. And I hypothesize that
| the reason there is a leap to "This is biased" today on
| reporting is because the news media organizations have
| participated in the cherry-picked facts case to enough of a
| degree that trust has eroded.
|
| Which is perhaps why organizations are searching for ways
| to not appear biased and begin to restore that trust. I
| think the reason the LLM approach is likely to fail is
| because it is unable to detect the "missing facts" case and
| can only really advise about sentiment and phrasing. Which
| is not I think the actual problem that needs fixing.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| I agree that an AI is unlikely to help. But also, I doubt
| that the primary reason is "restoring trust". I think the
| primary reason for many of them is that some of their
| readers react strongly to things they don't want to hear,
| and they're afraid of losing customers, so they're
| watering down their reporting to avoid being
| inconveniently right.
|
| Or, even less charitably, management and employees have
| different politics, and management are the ones who find
| the articles inconvenient.
|
| To be clear, there are absolutely biased news sources out
| there. For many of them, the bias is the point, and they
| have no particular desire to "restore trust" because
| they're already trusted by people who only want to read
| things supportive of their party. But a politician who
| finds the truth inconvenient will decry everything
| accurate as biased.
| tempodox wrote:
| How could an LLM even decide whether facts are presented in
| a balanced way? Someone at Law360 seems to believe in a
| magical oracle.
| sneak wrote:
| The factual accuracy of a statement does not have any
| bearing on the bias or agenda of the person making the
| statement.
|
| I have seen many documentaries that contain only facts and
| real events, but nevertheless are pushing a heavily biased
| agenda. Which facts we report and which we highlight and
| how we frame them tells a story.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| That as well as the words and tone that are used to describe
| things and the context surrounding those things. A headline
| that is neither negative nor positive is not strictly
| unbiased because it implies that the thing being reported is
| not very unusual. If it _is_ unusual, then the neutral tone
| is communicating a bias that this unusual thing should not be
| regarded as such.
| bmelton wrote:
| "... by definition, news is something that almost never
| happens."
|
| - Bruce Schneier
| mr_toad wrote:
| Except for the annual "health system in crisis" story.
|
| Edit: substitute any issue you care to name for "health
| system", there's always a crisis that can be used to grab
| eyeballs.
| o11c wrote:
| That's why "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the
| truth" is so important. Yet we don't even enforce the limited
| perjury laws we have.
|
| The common "must present both sides" approach can fail the
| "nothing but the truth" criterion. But even with its many
| errors, it's better than not trying anything at all.
| xp84 wrote:
| If "the administration" is The Good Party, the action is
| "groundbreaking" and "landmark." If the administration is The
| Bad Man, the action is "unprecedented." This is how you frame
| things to maximize the propaganda effect and scare/please the
| audience, while maintaining plausible deniability that you're
| definitely not pushing an agenda.
|
| (If my comment offends you, I assure you, don't worry, your
| party is definitely the Good Party in this scenario.)
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| I'm well aware of how spin works. However, that doesn't mean
| that such characterizarions are always _wrong_. One of the
| severe problems in current politics is that reporting that
| looks bad for a particular party will always be characterized
| as biased, _whether the reporting is accurate or not_.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| "It says here in this history book that, luckily, the good
| guys have won every single time"
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah the BBC suffers badly from this problem, because they are
| required by Ofcom to have fair and "balanced" reporting, and
| they interpret that as meaning they always have to get one view
| from each side of a story. Doesn't matter how batshit or fringe
| a side is, they'll present them equally.
| ars wrote:
| Is that why they come across as so antisemitic?
|
| Obviously there are biased antisemitic news organizations,
| but of the high-profile ostensibly neutral ones BBC stands
| head and shoulders above the rest in the level of
| antisemitism.
|
| (You don't have to take my word for it - a quick Google will
| find huge numbers of examples. Usually they'll get criticized
| and then post a correction, so in some sense they themselves
| acknowledge the problem - yet it keeps happening.)
| bigyabai wrote:
| Which definition of "semite" are we using, today? It tends
| to get thrown around to mean a lot of different things on
| HN.
| mhb wrote:
| You're happy to redefine genocide in a ludicrously
| expansive fashion but pretend to need clarification about
| what antisemitic means in this context? I know, you're
| just asking questions.
| mhb wrote:
| > Is that why they come across as so antisemitic?
|
| If you're inclined to offer the most charitable
| interpretation in the universe, perhaps.
| hitekker wrote:
| You might have seen different BBC stories than I have.
|
| Like when the BBC said all converts to Islam are "reverts";
| https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-did-the-bbc-say-
| musl... ; the nasty implication being that one religion is
| the status quo of humanity
|
| Or when the BBC framed an Ad as racist, because it called out
| a politician's sectarian & anti-LGBTQ appeals
| https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yg0g18989o https://www.re
| ddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/1ksv0y7/refo...
|
| The other day actually, I saw a newscaster describe the
| horrors Apartheid in South Africa as though it were happening
| today. She then closed with "... [Apartheid] is now no longer
| enforced" and transitioned quickly to the next topic. Not
| ended or abolished, but merely "not enforced".
|
| Their bias is rather pernicious.
| rafram wrote:
| > Like when the BBC said all converts to Islam are
| "reverts"
|
| They didn't. They used their interviewees' own preferred
| terminology to refer to them in the story, which is fine.
| "Reverts" is the most common term among Muslims. Sort of
| like how capitalizing God in a story about Christians
| doesn't invalidate the beliefs of people who worship
| multiple gods.
|
| > Or when the BBC framed an Ad as racist
|
| The first line: "Scottish Labour has described [...]".
| lazyeye wrote:
| This really is not it.
|
| Outright lies are very ineffective in manipulating public
| opinion because they can be easily disproven.
|
| It's much more about pretending its only a little rain when its
| raining alot. Ignoring the rain when it doesnt support your
| narrative. Pretending the rain is _really_ important when its
| not important at all. Pretending it only rains where you are
| and much less everywhere else etc etc etc.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > Outright lies are very ineffective in manipulating public
| opinion because they can be easily disproven.
|
| I sincerely wish this were true. "A lie can run around the
| world before the truth has got its boots on."
| BrenBarn wrote:
| Who checks the bias detector for bias?
| ethan_smith wrote:
| This creates an infinite regress problem - bias detection
| systems are themselves trained on data reflecting human
| judgments about what constitutes "bias."
| jasonthorsness wrote:
| LLMs and ML algorithms are beginning to influence the entire
| lifecycle of articles: researching, writing, editing,
| publication, discovery (TikTok), and consumption (ChatGPT
| summarize this). With the few big players, it could be the same
| model involved at every step. It's scary how a small change to a
| system prompt could subtly influence things across the board and
| guide popular opinion.
| wredcoll wrote:
| Remember kids, if you don't like the truth, just accuse it of
| being biased and force it to change!
| bilbo0s wrote:
| Truth is biased. That's what makes it truth.
|
| If you wanted unbiased information, you should have asked for
| facts..
|
| and then collected as many of them as you possibly could.
| saaaaaam wrote:
| I said to a colleague the other day that Law360's reporting seems
| to be more tortuous and weird than usual. I wonder if this is
| why.
|
| There was one piece on a case I've been following quite closely
| where I was genuinely unable to make sense of what had happened
| from the Law360 report without sitting down and spelling my way
| through it.
| pkilgore wrote:
| 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.
| lovich wrote:
| 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
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| > _Several sentences in the story were flagged as biased,
| including this one: "It's the first time in 60 years that a
| president has mobilized a state's National Guard without
| receiving a request to do so from the state's governor."
| According to the bias indicator, this sentence is "framing the
| action as unprecedented in a way that might subtly critique the
| administration." It was best to give more context to "balance the
| tone."_
|
| "Might subtly critique"?! This isn't protecting versus bias, this
| isn't even charitably regardable as cowardice.
|
| It's an attack on reason & reporting. To shield the worst cry
| bullies & offenders. It's ghastly how basic simple reporting so
| offends, that the public interest is sabotaged by these foes. We
| face such a need to improve the media, and this is the opposite
| path, of craven intelligently intermediated corporatism.
| iFire wrote:
| Does this mean automated censorship by AI "bias" detection?
| MangoToupe wrote:
| To me, a newsroom's bias IS its value. If you let me know your
| values, I can actually interpret what you're saying. It's the
| pretense of impartiality that makes me distrust someone.
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