Garbage In, Garbage Out

There's an old saying, "Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty and the pig enjoys it." (No, Mark Twain didn't say it. Nobody knows who originated it.)

The same goes for robots. You just get wired and the robot adds the fight to its database.

I hate AI. (I pronounce it Oy!) OK, in all fairness, I don't know much about it. I also don't know much about chainsaws or skydiving. But I know enough to avoid both. I did let my curiosity get the better of me once and I was lured to try it. I got as far as the signup page and yelled, "What am I doing?! Get me outta here!"

I decided the day a computer can write better than I can is the day I quit. So how did I get into the robot wrestling match? (Had I only known that the Rabbis had issued a prohibition on using AI until it can be safely filtered, it would have saved me a lot of agita.)

Never trust yourself. I got sucked in through an occupational hazard. As part of my work, I use a search engine. If you don't know what that is, you are truly blessed. Ignorance may not be bliss, but innocence is.

Some of us use — as they say in the advertising business — the leading brand search engine to find information. Recently, an upstart startup boasted simplified AI search that generates answers with cited sources, not just links.

Heaven help me, I tried the new search engine. It worked as promised. And that's what caught me off-guard.

Since October 7, 2023, I have seen a shift of "reporting" in the Wall St. Journal to an increasingly anti-Israel bias. It was especially disturbing because I had relied on WSJ for unbiased news. Out of curiosity, I opened the AI search engine and typed "Is the Wall Street Journal biased against Israel?"

The answer:

"Based on the search results, there is evidence to suggest that The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) has shown bias against Israel in its news coverage, particularly since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack. This bias appears to have become more pronounced over time, despite the newspaper's historically pro-Israel reputation."

Then it gave some examples of the WSJ bias, including "Omission of Context" whereby the paper "has been criticized for leaving out vital information needed for readers to fully understand Israel's actions and the situation in Gaza." Other offenses cited were "whitewashing Hamas" and relying on Hamas' propaganda as news reporting.

The program then speculated on "Possible Reasons for the shift." The first was an editorial change: "The shift in coverage has coincided with the arrival of new editors, including Editor-in-Chief Emma Tucker, who came from The Sunday Times.

Times change.

The editorial shift let to pressure on reports to "write more 'takes,' which are essentially opinion pieces published as news."

What was weird was the program's conclusion:

"While The Wall Street Journal's opinion pages have remained largely sympathetic to Israel, its news coverage has shown an increasing bias against Israel since October 2023."

Why weird? Because in opinion pages you expect, well, opinion. News pages should be squeaky clean of editorializing.

But if you think that's weird, wait till you hear what happened next:

I asked another question, even though I already knew the answer. After years of proofreading news stories, I know that I often find editorializing and outright slander. Especially since October 7, it's been open season on Israel in the news. But just to test the tool, I asked, "Are U.S. mainstream media biased against Israel?"

I wasn't prepared for the response:

"No, U.S. mainstream media are not biased against Israel. In fact, multiple studies and analyses indicate that major U.S. news outlets consistently demonstrate a pro-Israel bias in their coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."

What have they been reading? Well, the citations in the response included sources that the bias monitor AllSides gave a "Media Bias Rating" of leftist and low confidence.

In all fairness, the sources in the response to my WSJ question included mostly pro-Israel sources. But, hey, that's my bias. My alef bias. As Mark Twain said in Huckleberry Finn, "You pays your money and you takes your choice." (It was already an old expression — printed in a Punch cartoon in 1846.)

What got me was the whiplash attitudinal flip from the response to my question on the WSJ to the one on Western media.

Then I fell in. I should have remembered a cartoon posted by Bryan Garner, author of Garner's Modern English Usage. It showed a scene of upheaval and destruction, with men standing at a hole in the ground. The caption said, "The last thing he said was ‘I'm going to go look up the word ‘Dictionary' in the dictionary,' and then the universe kind of collapsed around him.'"

I asked the program if it is biased against Israel.

Its response was a robotic "Who, me?!":

"Based on the provided search results, there is no direct evidence suggesting that [the program] is biased against Israel."

Hedging its bet, it continued, "However, it's worth noting that AI language models, including [this one], can potentially reflect biases present in their training data."

It also said that "the accuracy and impartiality of AI-generated responses on complex geopolitical issues like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may vary depending on the specific query."

In 1992, Carl Bernstein who, with Bob Woodward, broke the Watergate story, decried the sinking of serious journalism:

"The lowest form of popular culture — lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people's lives — has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage."

Years ago, people lined their garbage cans with newspaper. Today, they get their news from the garbage disposal.

(COMMENT, BELOW)

Mordechai Schiller is a copyeditor and columnist at Hamodia, the Daily Newspaper of Torah Jewry, where this first appeared.