A REAL ‘FINGER’ IN ‘A.I.’
Biased ‘fact-checks’
Left-wing “fact-checking” group NewsGuard is reportedly selling censorship technology funded by some $750,000 in taxpayer money to a slew of companies, including Microsoft and its AI-powered bot Bing Chat.
NewsGuard’s Misinformation Fingerprints tool, which the group billed on its website as “the Internet’s most complete, machine-readable catalog of top false claims circulating online,” can be used to designate a “risk of harm” rating and provide “detailed debunks citing trustworthy sources,” according to the group.
NewsGuard also claimed that Microsoft incorporates the tech into its artificial intelligence-powered chatbot Bing Chat, a rival to ChatGPT and Google’s Bard.
“Microsoft trusts the fingerprints as ethically reported, responsible, and unbiased data to train Bing Chat’s large-language models (LLMs) to provide accurate responses to prompts on topics in the news and reduce their propensity to spread false claims,” NewsGuard reported earlier this year.
In the same post, NewsGuard boasted that GIF database GIPHY and the London-based social media platform Ethos Network, which targets Gen Z users, brought Misinformation Fingerprints “and associated ‘debunks’ into its user interface.”
Representatives at Microsoft, GIPHY and Ethos Network didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Citing records from the Department of Defense, The Federalist earlier reported that Misinformation Fingerprints was funded with an award from the federal government of some $750,000.
‘Apolitical’
It’s unclear how Misinformation Fingerprints determines what qualifies as “disinformation.”
The Federalist suggested that the department had some input in determining what constitutes misinformation as it worked with NewsGuard to test the technology.
NewsGuard told The Post, “Our ratings are based on apolitical journalistic criteria, and we publish them transparently and publicly.”
NewsGuard General Manager Matt Skibinski shied away from talking dollar figures, adding that “our Misinformation Fingerprints product has been sold to private companies since we first created the product in early 2020.”