- Bruce Schneier
Edit: substitute any issue you care to name for “health system”, there’s always a crisis that can be used to grab eyeballs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For example: "the bias indicator flagged a line that said the suit spotlighted challenges with ableism and sexism in the healthcare industry. This copy was flagged because it “frames the lawsuit as a representative example of systemic issues.” Instead, the bias indicator said the story should “state the facts of the lawsuit without suggesting its broader implications.”
The model made the right decision. That's the kind of language that makes people distrust journalists: a passive voice assertion of a radical belief, which adds nothing to the story and isn't supported by any evidence. It doesn't belong in a professionally written report.
And yet we read, "that edit is at odds with any attempt to deliver legal analysis. In most cases, reporters chose not to accept these edits, but they were still required to go through the motions."
Claiming the healthcare system is challenged by "ableism" isn't legal analysis, that's pure politics. But more importantly it's also just absurd. Of course people who work in healthcare want people to be "able". Why would you become a surgeon if you thought disability and sickness was fine? No surprise their bosses are placing the LLM's judgement over that of their own employees, when the journalists have gone so far off the rails. The union should be careful of picking a fight over this because frankly the next step is to just automate away the journalists entirely.
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.