A Media Watchdog Is Helping To Program AI Models. It Says Chinese Propaganda Is More Reliable Than Many American News Sources.

In February 2023, a few months after ChatGPT's public release, the media watchdog NewsGuard announced a new tool for artificial intelligence companies. The company, which rates the credibility of news outlets on a 100-point scale, had been selling its data to advertisers with the goal of steering them away from "unreliable" sources. Now it would license the same data to AI companies in a "machine-readable" format, ideal for training chatbots to avoid "misinformation."

NewsGuard—whose cofounder, Steven Brill, suggested in 2020 that the New York Post's Hunter Biden laptop story was a "hoax"—said its ratings could help models "identify trustworthy news and information sources." It encouraged AI companies to use the data during the "supervised learning" process, a technique that influences how models evaluate information and aligns their outputs with developers' preferences...