<story><title>Fake Barack Obama delivers a PSA about “deep fakes” using a deep fake video</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/tldr/2018/4/17/17247334/ai-fake-news-video-barack-obama-jordan-peele-buzzfeed</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>JeremyMorgan</author><text>The problem lies in the motive. News organizations are (not surprisingly) entirely motivated by profit. Breaking even is not enough. Doing well is not enough. Improving profit drastically quarter over quarter is the goal.&lt;p&gt;To do that, you cannot simply &amp;quot;provide news&amp;quot; anymore. You need conflict. You need confirmation bias. You need to create a wild, screaming echo chamber that induces panic and fear. You need conflict, even if you have to fudge the details to get it. You need to focus on some things and ignore others to increase it.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s no longer a partisan issue. I&amp;#x27;m 40 years old. I remember when you had to really pay attention to catch bias in the news. Do this yourself: go back and look at newsreels from the 80s and 90s. It&amp;#x27;s almost surreal. They were still biased, but presented information in a factual manner and then tossed in some emotional stuff. Many of them even... showed both sides of the argument. It&amp;#x27;s weird to watch now.&lt;p&gt;A news network simply cannot run with this format in 2018. Fox News was the leader, they were using bias, fearmongering, and propaganda almost from the start. They enjoyed very high ratings because of it. Now the other side has caught up. Because they had to.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s a mess, but one thing is for sure: we can&amp;#x27;t trust any of them anymore. Not 100%.</text></item><item><author>white-flame</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;It&amp;#x27;s a time when we need to rely on trusted news sources&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s the rub, isn&amp;#x27;t it?  Who&amp;#x27;s a &amp;quot;trusted&amp;quot; new source?  All the major players have shown biases, corruption, and manipulation.  Lots of people therefore consider some fly-by-night facebook feed that says what the majors don&amp;#x27;t to be more &amp;quot;trusted&amp;quot; in response.&lt;p&gt;We shouldn&amp;#x27;t &amp;quot;rely&amp;quot; on single points of perceived trust, especially in this massive for-profit, for-power media industry.  We need to be broadly informed from various angles to have a better chance of piecing together a reasonable sense of what&amp;#x27;s going on.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Spellman</author><text>Go back even further and pretty much every news source was a propaganda machine. Most of the major &amp;quot;trusted&amp;quot; new sources today started primarily in yellow journalism and political attack ads. Pulitzer was not a particularly nice man. Neither was Hearst.&lt;p&gt;It was a brief modern period when news sources decided to take themselves seriously and rise up ethically and appear &amp;quot;unbiased&amp;quot; to the public. It made the landscape more consolidated and monolithic, but it also drove sources to present relatively whole stories with what limited bandwidth they had to the largest population possible.&lt;p&gt;That being said, at the same time, radio hosts quite willingly went into the base-pandering and echo chambers. Conservative Talk Radio didn&amp;#x27;t crop up in the 2000s. They arrived after the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine from the FCC in 1987.&lt;p&gt;TV and print news only later realized if you insert just enough bias to make their viewers feel comfortable and to differentiate from their peers, they could make a WHOLE lot more money. And with the creation of a lot more time to sell news via 24hr channels and the Internet, you had to room to add in fluff, opinion, and other material.</text></comment>
<story><title>Fake Barack Obama delivers a PSA about “deep fakes” using a deep fake video</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/tldr/2018/4/17/17247334/ai-fake-news-video-barack-obama-jordan-peele-buzzfeed</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>JeremyMorgan</author><text>The problem lies in the motive. News organizations are (not surprisingly) entirely motivated by profit. Breaking even is not enough. Doing well is not enough. Improving profit drastically quarter over quarter is the goal.&lt;p&gt;To do that, you cannot simply &amp;quot;provide news&amp;quot; anymore. You need conflict. You need confirmation bias. You need to create a wild, screaming echo chamber that induces panic and fear. You need conflict, even if you have to fudge the details to get it. You need to focus on some things and ignore others to increase it.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s no longer a partisan issue. I&amp;#x27;m 40 years old. I remember when you had to really pay attention to catch bias in the news. Do this yourself: go back and look at newsreels from the 80s and 90s. It&amp;#x27;s almost surreal. They were still biased, but presented information in a factual manner and then tossed in some emotional stuff. Many of them even... showed both sides of the argument. It&amp;#x27;s weird to watch now.&lt;p&gt;A news network simply cannot run with this format in 2018. Fox News was the leader, they were using bias, fearmongering, and propaganda almost from the start. They enjoyed very high ratings because of it. Now the other side has caught up. Because they had to.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s a mess, but one thing is for sure: we can&amp;#x27;t trust any of them anymore. Not 100%.</text></item><item><author>white-flame</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;It&amp;#x27;s a time when we need to rely on trusted news sources&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s the rub, isn&amp;#x27;t it?  Who&amp;#x27;s a &amp;quot;trusted&amp;quot; new source?  All the major players have shown biases, corruption, and manipulation.  Lots of people therefore consider some fly-by-night facebook feed that says what the majors don&amp;#x27;t to be more &amp;quot;trusted&amp;quot; in response.&lt;p&gt;We shouldn&amp;#x27;t &amp;quot;rely&amp;quot; on single points of perceived trust, especially in this massive for-profit, for-power media industry.  We need to be broadly informed from various angles to have a better chance of piecing together a reasonable sense of what&amp;#x27;s going on.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vollmond</author><text>As a political radio host I used to listen to once said (on air, paraphrased from a memory from the early 2000s): &amp;quot;You should doubt and check everything I say. My job is not to inform you or tell you the truth. My job is to keep you listening so advertisers will pay my employer to run their ads.&amp;quot;</text></comment>