Can ‘AI’ enhance news reporting?

BRANCH member Owen Holdaway told our September meeting about his work helping to develop "Factual Inquirer" - a set of tools aimed to enhance news reporting. He reminded us that "social media and technology companies contributing to disinformation." His aim is to "give suggestions to journalists to improve the credibility and the transparency of the work they're doing".

Factual Inquirer (FI) is a work in progress. The aim is that it will advise journalists on aspects of others' reports: for example their newsworthiness. their credibility and their transparency versus the extent to which they are likely to have been subject to censorship. Owen gave as an example a FI report on a report of Tony Blair's case for invading Iraq in 2002. It failed the credibility test.

What FI does, as far as the Freelance understands it, is to assist users in composing queries and then to present these to a "large language model" (LLM; often marketed as "artificial intelligence" such as ChatGPT. Somewhere in there is another LLM "trained" on stories that Owen and colleagues have annotated or "labelled" for quality. The plan is to set up a subscription model, which will also give access to online forums where journalists can communicate with our non-artificial peers.

Look at the Facebook link below for updates.

Factual Inquirer on Facebook

News Learns Factual Inquirer News Forum

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