Law360 mandates reporters use AI "bias" detection on all stories

https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/07/law360-mandates-reporters-use-ai-bias-detection-on-all-stories/

63 84 1 year ago

jerf• 1 year ago

Today, somewhere in the world, some people made an event occur. Some people approved and some people disapproved. It impacted some people more than others, which some people think may be a bad thing, although others think that it may have been a good thing. The event stemmed from many past events, which many people have various strong opinions about. Politicians made various strong statements about the event, as well as a few celebrities. The future impact of the event is under debate, though experts agree that the situation is complicated and people should probably think about it very carefully before coming to conclusions. It is unclear what the market will do in response to this event.

Herring• 1 year ago

Party A: wants to abolish slavery
Party B: wants way more slaves
Media: record low percentage of Americans satisfied with agriculture today!

Impartiality is very important.

bilbo0s2• 1 year ago

In unrelated news:

General Sherman Begins Demolition in Georgia For Urgently Needed Infrastructure Projects

I mean, you could ask ChatGPT or something to make some pretty braindead impartial newspaper headlines about, like, the Holocaust or slavery. I guess you're right, in some cases, impartiality will come off as a bit ridiculous to the common sense segment of society.

nxobject• 1 year ago

Welp, I’ve read every newspaper article - at least I have an excuse not to read the news anymore for my sanity.

encom• 1 year ago

Breaking News: Some Bullshit Happening Somewhere: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9U4Ha9HQvMo>

add-sub-mul-div• 1 year ago

"Bias" and "narrative" have become meaningless words that people use when encountering ideas they don't like. Or when they believe that neither side could ever be right about an issue, that it's virtuous for a stance to be in the middle of the current Overton window.

nh23423fefe• 1 year ago

I don't like this idea. Bias is lying to advance your position. Narrative is telling a story to persuade instead of making an argument to persuade.

JoshTriplett7• 1 year ago

While I'd favor defining words rather than claiming they're meaningless, those aren't accurate definitions.

"Narrative" in this context is more like "attempting to steer the current discourse by making connections among things and positioning them as part of a coherent story", which can be positive (if the result is accurate and reasonable and helps people better understand what's going on) or negative (if it's spin or manufacturing consent). It's "narrative" to say "you should be afraid of X, it's the cause of all your problems". It's also "narrative" to say "here are the five different things we're currently doing to improve Y, and how they tie together into a coherent picture".

Also, bias would be easier to deal with if it were always "lying", or if it advanced a coherent position. It's much broader than that.

Gormo2• 1 year ago

I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to presume that more valid positions are likely to be found closer to the midpoint of the current Overton window. I suspect that as a matter of Bayesian probability, more extreme positions are more likely to be wrong.

MangoToupe5• 1 year ago

On which topic? Saying the average person can't decide between two viewpoints on any given topic seems ridiculous.

ElevenLathe2• 1 year ago

The whole premise of the Overton window is that it does not represent the full spectrum of opinions on some issues, which is unchanging, but rather some socially constructed window onto that spectrum, which does change. Assuming that the midpoint is probably correct is equivalent to saying that any change from the status quo is probably bad. Is that what you really mean?

const_cast2• 1 year ago

Based on a gander at history, I doubt it. Usually one side is actually right and it seems very obvious now but was not obvious at the time. And, typically, the moderate or midpoint position seem incredibly stupid now. Like the 3/5ths compromise.

MangoToupe5• 1 year ago

Even presenting a given problem as "merely" two-sided is often disingenuous.

For instance, if you "just" look at abortion, trans rights, and immigration, you may assume the two parties in america present diametrically-opposed groups of people (...which is even itself quite debatable). But this is only because the two parties don't differ much (or at least, don't bother to platform enough to evaluate) on most topics politics could be about.

owisd• 1 year ago

The problem with trying too hard to neutrally report both sides of a story is that's not unbiased either, it's just biased in favour of the side that can lie the most convincingly.

wredcoll4• 1 year ago

I am so, so tired, of "both sides" reporting. How about just report the facts instead?

schmidtleonard• 1 year ago

It's a rare issue that you can't swing both ways by selecting the subset of facts to focus on. Attention doesn't just matter, it's all that matters. This is why adversarial forums are so important even if they so often degenerate into shouting past one another: each side has the ability and motivation to bring its strongest facts, so they are at least present in the discussion, even if debate tactics add tons of noise and confirmation bias dampens the effects.

an0malous• 1 year ago

Because there’s basically no such thing and choosing which facts you report is a huge source of bias anyway

kube-system• 1 year ago

Nearly all political issues are rooted in philosophical differences of opinion. "The facts" are merely the icing on the cake that various factions use to lure people to their ideology. Factual reporting is better than direct opinion reporting, but both are inherently interpreted by people in the context of the Overton window.

MangoToupe5• 1 year ago

First you'd have to get people to agree on what a fact is, let alone what the facts are.

const_cast2• 1 year ago

It's also naturally biased in favor of whoever is more extreme. It's like trying to balance a scale so you place both items on the scale... but one is a rock and the other is a feather.

JoshTriplett7• 1 year ago

Timeless quote:

If Jimmy Allred says it’s raining, and W. Lee O’Daniel says it isn’t raining, Texas newspapermen quote them both, and don’t look out the window to see which is lying, and to tell the readers what the truth is at the moment.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2023/11/14/rain-look/

If an AI tool, or for that matter a meddling editor, says a headline is "framing the action as unprecedented in a way that might subtly critique the administration", the correct response is "yes, that was the idea".

sandwichsphinx• 1 year ago

reminds me of the essay "Politics and the English Language" George Orwell wrote in 1946, it's a good read

zaphar2• 1 year ago

I don't think most reporting bias takes the form of incorrect facts. It takes the form of picking which facts to share driven by the facts that matter the most to the particular reporter sharing them. This results in slanted coverage even if technically it's "factual".

JoshTriplett7• 1 year ago

Take a look at the headline flagged in the article, which the tool flagged as "framing the action as unprecedented in a way that might subtly critique the administration". The headline is factually accurate, and the facts are not cherry-picked.

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.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF• 1 year ago

That as well as the words and tone that are used to describe things and the context surrounding those things. A headline that is neither negative nor positive is not strictly unbiased because it implies that the thing being reported is not very unusual. If it is unusual, then the neutral tone is communicating a bias that this unusual thing should not be regarded as such.

o11c• 1 year ago

That's why "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" is so important. Yet we don't even enforce the limited perjury laws we have.

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.

egberts1• 1 year ago

"slanted", isn't that a form of biasness? #headduck

xp84• 1 year ago

If “the administration” is The Good Party, the action is “groundbreaking” and “landmark.” If the administration is The Bad Man, the action is “unprecedented.” This is how you frame things to maximize the propaganda effect and scare/please the audience, while maintaining plausible deniability that you’re definitely not pushing an agenda.

(If my comment offends you, I assure you, don’t worry, your party is definitely the Good Party in this scenario.)

JoshTriplett7• 1 year ago

I'm well aware of how spin works. However, that doesn't mean that such characterizarions are always wrong. One of the severe problems in current politics is that reporting that looks bad for a particular party will always be characterized as biased, whether the reporting is accurate or not.

rrr_oh_man• 1 year ago

"It says here in this history book that, luckily, the good guys have won every single time"

IshKebab2• 1 year ago

Yeah the BBC suffers badly from this problem, because they are required by Ofcom to have fair and "balanced" reporting, and they interpret that as meaning they always have to get one view from each side of a story. Doesn't matter how batshit or fringe a side is, they'll present them equally.

ars• 1 year ago

Is that why they come across as so antisemitic?

Obviously there are biased antisemitic news organizations, but of the high-profile ostensibly neutral ones BBC stands head and shoulders above the rest in the level of antisemitism.

(You don't have to take my word for it - a quick Google will find huge numbers of examples. Usually they'll get criticized and then post a correction, so in some sense they themselves acknowledge the problem - yet it keeps happening.)

hitekker2• 1 year ago

You might have seen different BBC stories than I have.

Like when the BBC said all converts to Islam are "reverts"; https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-did-the-bbc-say-musl... ; the nasty implication being that one religion is the status quo of humanity

Or when the BBC framed an Ad as racist, because it called out a politician's sectarian & anti-LGBTQ appeals https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yg0g18989o https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/1ksv0y7/refo...

The other day actually, I saw a newscaster describe the horrors Apartheid in South Africa as though it were happening today. She then closed with "... [Apartheid] is now no longer enforced" and transitioned quickly to the next topic. Not ended or abolished, but merely "not enforced".

Their bias is rather pernicious.

lazyeye4• 1 year ago

This really is not it.

Outright lies are very ineffective in manipulating public opinion because they can be easily disproven.

It's much more about pretending its only a little rain when its raining alot. Ignoring the rain when it doesnt support your narrative. Pretending the rain is really important when its not important at all. Pretending it only rains where you are and much less everywhere else etc etc etc.

JoshTriplett7• 1 year ago

Outright lies are very ineffective in manipulating public opinion because they can be easily disproven.

I sincerely wish this were true. "A lie can run around the world before the truth has got its boots on."

thrance3• 1 year ago

Have you looked at American politics recently? The current administration creates huge lies daily, and most of the media relays them uncritically. It's a level of shamelessness previously reserved for countries like Russia.

BrenBarn• 1 year ago

Who checks the bias detector for bias?

ethan_smith• 1 year ago

This creates an infinite regress problem - bias detection systems are themselves trained on data reflecting human judgments about what constitutes "bias."

kelseyfrog• 1 year ago

That's the nice thing. You don't. The conceit of centrism/Liberalism is that extreme voices cancel out. Just ingest a large enough corpus and the central limit theorum takes care of the rest.

jasonthorsness• 1 year ago

LLMs and ML algorithms are beginning to influence the entire lifecycle of articles: researching, writing, editing, publication, discovery (TikTok), and consumption (ChatGPT summarize this). With the few big players, it could be the same model involved at every step. It's scary how a small change to a system prompt could subtly influence things across the board and guide popular opinion.

wredcoll4• 1 year ago

Remember kids, if you don't like the truth, just accuse it of being biased and force it to change!

bilbo0s2• 1 year ago

Truth is biased. That's what makes it truth.

If you wanted unbiased information, you should have asked for facts..

and then collected as many of them as you possibly could.

MangoToupe5• 1 year ago

More people should really read Baudrillard. Objectivity and language don't combine very well. Show me a person who wants the facts and I'll show you someone who is easily manipulated.

saaaaaam• 1 year ago

I said to a colleague the other day that Law360’s reporting seems to be more tortuous and weird than usual. I wonder if this is why.

There was one piece on a case I’ve been following quite closely where I was genuinely unable to make sense of what had happened from the Law360 report without sitting down and spelling my way through it.

pkilgore• 1 year ago

What I do not understand is this top-down mandate that people use specific tools.

Mandate productivity, mandate quality; the tools will be adopted if they are sharp.

But elevating the way work is performed above the work itself? Weird.

lovich• 1 year ago

I don't know how you read this article and came away that they were merely trying to force adoption of AI tools.

This is LexisNexis requiring all of their workers run their output through a censorship machine to comply with the whims of the current administration. It has zero benefits to the workers so of course they have to mandate it

mike_hearn2• 1 year ago

It's because the executives don't trust the journalists to do the work properly.

The article says that explicitly: customers have complained about the quality of the work. The business owners view unhappy customers as a threat to their business, and so have introduced automation to make product quality higher and more even. The workers are unhappy because they don't want to be automated away and resent the implication that their artisanally hand-crafted articles aren't good enough. This is a very old story that's been going on for hundreds of years. There's nothing special about it.

jauntywundrkind• 1 year ago

Several sentences in the story were flagged as biased, including this one: "It’s the first time in 60 years that a president has mobilized a state’s National Guard without receiving a request to do so from the state’s governor." According to the bias indicator, this sentence is "framing the action as unprecedented in a way that might subtly critique the administration." It was best to give more context to “balance the tone."

"Might subtly critique"?! This isn't protecting versus bias, this isn't even charitably regardable as cowardice.

It's an attack on reason & reporting. To shield the worst cry bullies & offenders. It's ghastly how basic simple reporting so offends, that the public interest is sabotaged by these foes. We face such a need to improve the media, and this is the opposite path, of craven blunt un-intelligently intermediated corporatism.

iFire• 1 year ago

Does this mean automated censorship by AI "bias" detection?

MangoToupe5• 1 year ago

To me, a newsroom's bias IS its value. If you let me know your values, I can actually interpret what you're saying. It's the pretense of impartiality that makes me distrust someone.

croes• 1 year ago

Who watches the watchers?

exiguus• 1 year ago

I have so many question.

Let's say a media outlet, like a newspaper, commits to common journalism best practices, such as neutrality. In my opinion, this does not mean avoiding certain words; it means presenting different perspectives on a topic based on evidence.

Besides that, if someone writes an Op-Ed or commentary, the author expresses their personal opinion. How does this work with this AI thingy? Currently it looks like plain censorship, isn't it?

And why should I buy a newspaper that does not represent my political or personal opinion? I thought that was how it worked.

eddythompson80• 1 year ago

well, in this particular example I think the answer is straightforward: it's just an ad so it doesn't matter.

This is a marketing/sales piece for LexisNexis by their marketing agency as they try to sell AI services to their customers (law firms and other legal professions). It gives them a news article to share with their customers and tell them something like "see, we're taking the AI plunge. You should too. We offer a bunch of legal AI services, lets talk". Now their CEO and sales people can keep saying "I'm sure you've seen the news about Law360. We think AI is finally ready for legal tasks. You know, as an assistant."

In reality, they are probably to run the article, look at what the AI says and shrug and move on.

Law360 mandates reporters use AI "bias" detection on all stories

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