[julienreszka]

This is the kind of biased reporting that hurts journalism as a profession. It is not journalism's job to sell the public on anything. It's journalism's job to report the news.

And if a large portion of the public doesn't believe the news is being reported accurately, that is a very big problem for journalism.

[tsimionescu]

What exactly is biased in this reporting? It is presenting an event that actually happened (Facebook took down their new Galactica AI model), presenting the reasons why it seems to have happened (numerous researchers lambasting it), with first-hand sources, while also making sure to quote the official reason given, and also a less official comment on the event from the lead researcher that seems to support their previous thesis.

To me it seems like a decent example of what journalism should aspire to be for this kind of topic. Bad journalism would have just quoted the official Facebook tweet and stopped there, like so many journalists do with political declarations.

[cdrini]

Your last example is an example of terrible journalism. But I wouldn't quite call this article good journalism. There are lots of spots where it crossed the line of presenting facts to making bold, unprovable assumptions. Here are some examples that felt like bias

- "Meta’s misstep—and its hubris—show once again that Big Tech has a blind spot about the severe limitations of large language models."

"Hubris" here is unnecessary colouring. And although it links to an article (yay), an article can't justify statements like "big tech has a blind spot", "big tech hubris", or "language models are _severely_ limited".

- "Meta and other companies working on large language models, including Google, have failed to take [this technology's limitations] seriously."

This is unciteable.

- "They think that this is the future of information access, even if nobody asked for that future."

This was a quote from one of the researcher's. But presenting it as the last line of the article, without noting that this is one researcher's opinion but instead using it almost as 'proof' of a previous sentence "But Meta’s handling of Galactica smacks of the same naivete [as Microsoft's Tay bot]." Makes the use of the quote biased.

Also biased is the information not included. One of the tweets they cited shows that Galactica had a big disclaimer that it did hallucinate and that you shouldn't blindly trust its output. They choose not to directly include information by the project the whole article was about, to push the argument that "big tech is ignoring the limitations of this tech".

I think an unbiased article to me would've looked like :

- describing what happened first. Galactica took down their model. There has been a lot of criticism from researchers. - expand into the known limitations of this technology (including Galactica's stated limitations) - speculate whether there's a place for this tech on the future based on the cited work.

[tsimionescu]

Fair points - there is too much editorializing, and I had missed some of it.

[rossdavidh]

There are lots of problems with journalism today. This article isn't one of them, and its criticisms seem spot-on. It also brought up past attempts at something similar by Microsoft and Google, providing valuable context for somebody reading this who didn't know about those earlier efforts, so that they wouldn't think this was a failing specific to Meta.