Anyone who’s spent much time on the web will know what TL;DR stands for⁠—but, for everyone else, it’s an acronym for “Too Long, Didn’t Read”.

It’s an understandable sentiment we’ve all felt at some point. People lead busy lives. Some outlets now even specialise in short, at-a-glance news.

The problem is, it’s hard to get the full picture of a story in just a brief snippet.

In a world where fake news can be posted and spread like wildfire across social networks – almost completely unchecked – it feels even more dangerous to normalise “news” being delivered in short-form without full context.

There are two sides to most stories, and it’s hard to see how both can be summarised properly.

News folks are not going to love this. Some product manager announced internally a tool that FB is developing called "TL;DR". Basically, it will use AI to summarize long form articles and spit out bullet points so people don't have to read the full piece.

What could go wrong!

— editor Mac 🙃 (@RMac18) December 15, 2020

However, the argument also goes the other way. When articles are too long, people have a natural habit of skim-reading them. Skimming in this way often means people then believe they’re fully informed on a topic… when we know that’s often not the case.

TL;DR needs to strike a healthy balance between summarising the news but not so much that people don’t get enough of the story. Otherwise, it could increase existing societal problems with misinformation, fake news, and lack of media trust.

According to BuzzFeed, Facebook showed off TL;DR during an internal meeting this week. 

Facebook appears to be planning to add an AI-powered assistant to TL;DR which can answer questions about the article. The assistant could help to clear up anything the reader is uncertain about, but it’s also going to have to prove it doesn’t suffer from any biases which arguably all current algorithms suffer from to some extent.

The AI is also going to have to be very careful in not taking things like quotes out-of-context and end up further automating the spread of misinformation.

There’s also going to be a debate over what sources Facebook should use. Should Facebook stick only to the “mainstream media” which many believe follow the agendas of certain powerful moguls? Or serve news from smaller outlets without much historic credibility? The answer probably lies somewhere in the middle, but it’s going to be difficult to get right.

Facebook continues to be a major source of misinformation – in large part driven by algorithms promoting such content – and it’s had little success so far in any news-related efforts. I think most people will be expecting this to be another disaster waiting to happen.

(Image Credit: Mark Zuckerberg by Alessio Jacona under CC BY-SA 2.0 license)

The post Facebook is developing a news-summarising AI called TL;DR appeared first on AI News.

Xinhua appears to be using two human anchors for the base layer – one Chinese-speaking, and the other English. The humans are then animated to appear like they’re reporting the day’s news.

The technology looks similar to that used for ‘DeepFakes’ – videos where celebrity faces are imposed on actresses in adult videos, complete with realistic expressions.

Rather than creating each scene using something time-consuming like CGI, such a technology allows the AI reporter to quickly read whatever text it’s been provided with. In the fast-paced world of news coverage, each second counts.

In the US, a news anchor’s salary on average is $83,300 per year. Depending on the market size and similar circumstances, it can range up to $875,000.

Using AI anchors could save outlets potentially millions per year, almost eliminate chances of errors, and they’re available 24/7 whenever news breaks.

With trust in the media at all-time lows, AI anchors will likely make the situation worse. Anonymous individuals being able to write anything they want and have it reported by something else sounds like a scenario ripe for abuse.

China is already known for its state control over media. Even the US appears to be edging closer by deciding which reporters can, and cannot, report on events.

 AI & >.

The post China’s first AI news anchor has debuted for a state-run outlet appeared first on AI News.