this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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It would need to be told to do so, of course. I can think of a couple of approaches. You could have it use a database to track the identities of information sources, so the AI would know whether it was coming from new or well-established sources. It could check to see if the news is appearing in other sources. A lot of this isn't strictly large-language-model-based capability, but it would be using LLMs to interpret its inputs.
Analysis is social media through the lens of tracking source reliability would be damned useful without AI and if that could easily be done I think it would already be. I've thought about this for about five years, thinking we could track bots and disinformation based on the patterns of who promotes/upvotes it, but it's beyond my meager means.
I think certain places (reddit?) Have been using algorithms to find and stamp out bots/vote manipulation for quite a while. I remember at least one major wave of bans for smurfed accounts participating in manipulation.
Human journalists already do this, though. All I'm suggesting is that these automated journalists should do likewise. That clearly wasn't the case in this particular instance.
Beep bop, I'm [citation needed] bot, a large language model. The information you referenced in your post can neither be found in official Blizzard material including release notes, nor in community wikis. Have a nice day!
Exactly. An AI journalist could easily have a rule that tells it to go web-searching for other sources when something new like this pops up. If the WoW subreddit is going on about Glorbo rumors, check the other WoW fora to see if the same thing is being talked about there. Perhaps it would have found a post where someone talked about what those silly Redditors are up to with their fake Glorbo antics, or at the very least there would have been a suspicious silence.
Right now AI journalists are only being used to replace the absolute bottom-of-the-barrel human journalism, because that's really cheap and easy and since that bottom-of-the-barrel journalism doesn't earn much revenue finding a cheaper way to churn it out is useful. So AI journalism is getting a bad reputation. I hope that when the more refined AI journalists start putting out higher-quality material it won't stick too badly. I've seen how whole disciplines of technology can be tarred with stereotypes that prevent it from being used in applications where it would be a genuine boon.