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Comment by orangedog | Hacker News Reader

Should they just not report on it?

It's fine to report on it. What's not fine is how the same news organizations that report on it will turn a blind eye to Israel doing the exact same thing, just orders of magnitude bigger.

There are different forms of bias, like active/passive voice, how Palestinians "die" whereas Israelis are "killed" and even multiple instances of Israeli soldiers being "abducted" or even "kidnapped" from a tank. But there's also what media outlets don't report on, such as the use of the Hannibal doctrine on October 7. I can't find a report on this on the NYT. Because there was no independent investigation, it's unclear how many Israelis were killed by the IDF and very little Western reporting on it, such as the eyewitness accounts of Yasmin Porat [1].

Israeli hasbara is pervasive so yes, this is entirely relevant context when there's a report of 100 ChatGPT articles allegedly originating from Iran.

[1]: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-01-06/ty-article/.p...

Like how the New York Times "reported" on Iraq having weapons of mass distruction?

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-new-york-times-wmd-cov...

You first need to show that this article is lying or incorrect. Otherwise I can just bring up that same article for every single media artifle ever posted and suggest that because the media was wrong once I can't trust any media.

The only source in this article is OpenAI, which has strong Israeli alliances:

https://x.com/StopArabHate/status/1806450091399745608

It's not credible.

What about the editor that ran one of the articles agreeing that he didn't vet it

You still aren't providing any evidence to suggest why the article is invalid.

That doesn't mean Iran did it. This whole store is bogus, it's publishing an OpenAI claim as fact with zero push back.

> The campaign placed about 100 fake articles across at least 20 news outlets, the company said.

The entire article is couched in terms like this, showing it's what the company is claiming. How exactly would you push back against internal data a company is using?

Once again, should they just not report on it?

No, they shouldn't report on it. Did they ask OpenAI for proof? If so, that's not mentioned in the article. This isn't researched or vetted enough to report.

What proof would be acceptable? That could just as easily be made up.

"Proof" isn't the baseline for reporting on things.

Real journalism tries to verify sources. This doesn't even attempt to do that. There's no "the WP couldn't independently verify OpenAI's claim". It's just directly broadcasting what OpenAI says without even attempting to question it. This is not journalism.

>You first need to show that this article is lying or incorrect.

Jeff Bezos quotes Sam Altman. No, no one needs to show anything. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. One billionaire says another billionaire said is not proof and not evidence.

This isn't an extraordinary claim. Iran is at war, they have a propaganda arm, it would be shocking if they weren't doing this.

What exactly would meet your standard of proof?

Once again, they quote an editor of one of the outlets that ran these stories. The entire article falls apart if the fake journalist is actually a real journalist; this makes it very easy to confirm.

"It was the Iranians, trust us" is not proof. The pretense that it is, is itself deeply offensive.

The United States government is at war with Iran. Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos both have significant interests in pleasing the U.S. government. It would be shocking if they weren't pushing propaganda for the U.S. government.

This isn't news. It's "Iran bad" snarling, badly disguised as journalism.

What would proof look like for you?

I suspect you don't hold other news stories to the same standards We have a claim from a company and the media is reporting on it.

>I suspect you don't hold other news stories to the same standards

And I suspect you're engaging in ad hominems. :-)

Trustworthy sources and actual evidence are two things I like before even considering things at face value. This has neither.

You make a sound argument for not trusting the media (more precisely, the New York Times or whoever the editors were for that article). If an institution has an incident where they support batshit crazy claims from the military in support of getting who-knows-how-many people killed it would make sense to stop listening to them on military topics.

WP is not the NYT.

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