Not exactly to do with books, but tangential and interesting to PG (who is in the midst of a nasty cold this morning).
From The Wall Street Journal:
Fact-checking live news has one major downside: It’s slow. By the time a fact-checker can verify a claim, any misleading information has already spread and been consumed.
Enter Sparks Grove, the digital innovation and experience design wing of Atlanta-based consultancy North Highland. After interviewing scores of print and broadcast journalists from the U.S., U.K. and Ireland about the challenges of combating misinformation in the news, developers at Sparks Grove created Voyc, voice-scanning tool powered by artificial intelligence that can identify a questionable statement as little as two seconds after it’s uttered.
“We’re trying to build something that … connects people to information faster,” said Jack Stenson, innovation lead who conceived Voyc. “In the case of media, it’s connecting to what might be the most accurate truth.”
. . . .
Voyc works by transcribing live audio and running each statement against a database of facts culled from verified government sources and accredited fact-checking organizations. The software quickly can identify if a statement conflicts with verified information and send a pop-up text alert to a producer or someone in position to ask further questions that highlights both the sentence at issue and the relevant facts on an instant messenger-like interface.
Designers were careful not to characterize misleading statements in “true” or “false” terms, however. “We’re not trying to be the judges and jury of truth,” said Mr. Stenson. “If you have a technology that does, say, black or white, then it shuts down the conversation. … We would love it to help drive debates.”
. . . .
Voyc’s Mr. Stenson envisions news producers using the technology to encourage television presenters to probe their subjects with follow-up questions in one-on-one interviews, panel discussions and debates. Voyc is still a prototype and there’s no timeline for when the software could appear in television production booths. In the meantime, developers are working to improve Voyc’s accuracy when transcribing idiosyncratic speech patterns, such as dialects, pauses, “ums” and “ahs.”
. . . .
“It’s really difficult, especially for hosts who want to be careful about seeming partisan or challenging something on the fly when they don’t have all the facts at their fingertips,” he said. “If there were some way to facilitate challenging questionable claims sort of at the moment of utterance, that could be really useful.”
Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal
The people behind the Voyc product seem to assume that news organizations want to fact check the stories they air. There’s a lot of evidence to the contrary.
For instance, the bold coverage of the woman with two children running from tear gas that totally omits the numbers of young men throwing rocks at the Border Patrol agents that precipitated the use of tear gas.
It might be more useful if this product were used to inform the public of when a news story was inaccurate. An unbiased source would be nice to have.
The only time I see the news being “fact checked” is when some conservative news source’s reporting disagrees with a liberal news source’s reporting — and the “fact checking” is always done by liberal organizations, and it somehow always goes against the conservative reporting.
Politicians are only the second biggest liars in this country, fact checkers are Numero Uno – actually tied for this dishonor with the media. I can’t wait to watch MSNBC fact check CNN and vice versa – talk about a circle jerk. No one is independent. Everyone has a bias. All the way up to the Supreme Court. Bunch of used car salesmen.
The lie is always in bold on page one, the correction will be in fine print on page 21 (under the junk cars for sale.)