Your Own News By AI

BBC News to create AI department to offer more personalized content

This idea will rot your mind.

Personalization is good in its place; if the pizza shop remembers that I like extra cheese, or when the wait staff at the diner remember that I always have the cheap burger on Thursdays, that smoothes off the rougher edges of living.

I have written before wondering why the Royal Bank ATM at the corner of Bay and College can’t remember that on every Friday at 8 a.m. for the past seven years I have withdrawn $100 as five twenty dollar notes. When my card slides into that slot, I want the ATM at Bay and College to say “Here he is again”, and once I have typed in my PIN, the ATM should throw up a default screen for me indicating that “I want to withdraw cash from the chequing account to the sum of a hundred dollars in twenties, please”. No need to patiently stab at each screen to build upon the request.

That’s personalization.

But in the news personalization is destructive,

Here’s an example: I like eating fresh dandelion leaves for nine months of the year; I believe that they are more nutritious than Romaine Lettuce; I know that they are cheaper; and I know that anything carried in from the back lawn has to be fresher than something trucked up from Sonora in Mexico.

News-AI detects that I read articles on dandelion leaves, and my news source is then biased towards articles that promote eating dandelion leaves. My beliefs are reinforced. I grow entrenched.

I will not see an article that others see, an article that claims that dandelion leaves, when consumed in salads by humans over sixty years old, increase the chance of a heart attack or stroke by four hundred percent.

We already know this from genetics: a remixing of genes offers the wider variation in body characteristics that enables a species to survive and prosper in our world. Inbreeding narrows the perspective and can lead to a narrowing gorge that becomes a dead-end. Literally.

Thrive on dissension with a variety of ideas.

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