Tags: accuracy

How to report better on artificial intelligence - Columbia Journalism Review

• Be skeptical of PR hype
• Question the training data
• Evaluate the model
• Consider downstream harms

Idle Words: Anatomy of a Moral Panic

The real story in this mess is not the threat that algorithms pose to Amazon shoppers, but the threat that algorithms pose to journalism. By forcing reporters to optimize every story for clicks, not giving them time to check or contextualize their reporting, and requiring them to race to publish follow-on articles on every topic, the clickbait economics of online media encourage carelessness and drama.

AMP: breaking news | Andrew Betts

A wide-ranging post from Andrew on the downsides of Google’s AMP solution.

I don’t agree with all the issues he has with the format itself (in my opinion, the fact that AMP pages can’t have script elements is a feature, not a bug), but I wholeheartedly concur with his concerns about the AMP cache:

It recklessly devalues the URL

Spot on! And as Andrew points out, in this age of fake news, devaluing the URL is a recipe for disaster.

It’s hard to avoid the idea that the primary objective of AMP is really about hosting publisher content inside the Google ecosystem (as is more obviously the objective of Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News).