AI-Led News Platform Cuts Slant, Seeks Consensus
With a starkly polarized political climate and even reputable news sources being accosted these days as “fake news” by legions of Internet pundits, angry uncles, and even the President himself, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to know where to turn to for factual—let alone unbiased—reporting on the world’s news.
AI-based news source Knowhere, however, seeks to offer the public a way of directly finding out the news of the day, unbiased and absent either the misinformation from the deluge of cheaply-made online fake news as well as the subtle slant of mainstream news sources.
Describing itself as “the world’s most unbiased news,” Knowhere aggregates news sources in near real-time, scanning more than a thousand sources pre-ranked by Knowhere in terms of reputability and trustworthiness. When Knowhere’s engine detects that a breaking news event is trending and that at least five major verified news sources have reported on it, the AI begins to generate its own story. Within as little as 15 minutes of breaking news, Knowhere can produce its own coverage, offering an unbiased “Impartial” story as well as “Right” and “Left” tilted stories based on respective political biases.
Above: Knowhere uses a simple, brilliant approach allowing users to read an unbiased news story and then ‘spin’ it to see a left- or right- leaning version of coverage.
Offering biased stories with subtle differences in wording and tone (and even imagery) that helps demonstrate right- and left-leaning takes on a newsworthy event, Knowledge lets users see how both sides of the political spectrum are likely to report on a given issue—a useful feature when trying to pick apart what is happening from the potential influence of who is reporting it, especially in todays’s breakneck news cycle.
By providing minimally biased reportage as well as concrete examples of biased stories based on the consensus of thousands of sources, Knowhere provides a powerful tool for media literacy that might also help a user examine how his or her biases might influence perspectives.
Above: A popular chart showing the quality and ideological leanings of common news sources. Via MediaBiasChart.com.
Founded by Nathaniel Barling who also serves as the site’s editor-in-chief, Knowhere keeps human influence in the loop to ensure that the AI’s stories are readable and are indeed as minimally biased as possible. While the site’s AI does the bulk of collections and reporting, every story is reviewed by at least two human editors for style, truthfulness and bias, further improving the AI by reinforcement. Finally, none of the site’s stories go live without Barling’s final approval.
While not perfect (the site can’t do original reporting, and is only as good as the news sources it relies on) and still reliant on potentially biased human editors, Knowhere is a brilliant step in the right direction amid our increasingly confusing media landscape of information overload and sources biased by polarized allegiances subtle and not-so-subtle alike.
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