[Lerc]

Good people can do bad things.

Bad people can do good things.

Evaluate the things, you may do so being aware of their provenance, but if you use that as the starting point of your conclusion then you are just asking for your biases to be confirmed.

There does need to be a higher form of journalistic accountability. If Thiel, or any other person on the planet, proposed a fair mechanism that was free from influence, I would support it.

For this I don't neet to know who is behind it, I need to know what its goals are, how it operates, and how does it maintain integrity.

Certainly coming from an odius person increases the chance it will not measure up, but for fucks sake, at least do the measuring.

[jfengel]

As described in the article, this is not a fair mechanism and it is entirely based on influence.

This is a bad person doing a bad thing.

[Lerc]

Very little of the article talks about their process.

>Objection assigns a human investigator — at the $2,000 price tier, a college graduate; for $10,000, a former CIA or FBI agent — to gather evidence, which is displayed as exhibits. In my case, just about all of it appeared to be extraneous documentation, like incorporation paperwork for Sackler’s firm, which seemed irrelevant to the matter at hand. Then it prompts a group of AI models (including the name-brand ones such as Claude, ChatGPT and Grok) to act as its jury, analyzing the evidence. D’Souza promises that conclusions will be transparent: “We expose all the math that underpins what we do.”

Without pointing to specifics, it doesn't indicate systematic bias.

The amount of money paid and combined with the ability of current AIs wouldn't result in anything that I would expect to be reliable, but without showing failures in their methodology, it seems to be just assuming they will exist because they are bad people.

The criticism of >Objection’s framing is prosecutorial and binary, asking whether it’s true or false that THR claimed Sackler had used his firm as an “identity makeover” to deflect from his family’s responsibility for the opioid crisis. Yet the article was an inquiry, not a judgment.

I'm not particularly fond of the defence of "I'm just asking questions" when any reasonable person can see that the fact that the fact that the prominence of the question suggests otherwise.

"Does Peter Thiel keep a small boy locked it a glass cabinet?" and "Did Peter Thiel have cornflakes for breakfast?" The answer to both questions is likely no. Choosing to put one out there and not the other is not "Just asking questions"

That applies equally to the THR story and Objection AI. I would grant Objection AI a little leeway for framing the question as "Is it true or false that,..." which is more clearly a statement that allegations exist which may be in doubt, but only if the final result is a definite answer to the question. "Yes", "No", "Insufficient information exists", and "This is subjective" are all valid responses. I would also accept "This question is unanswerable". Any article that poses a question, followed by a series of allegations and then finishes with the question just hanging there unaddressed, is essentially asserting its truth.

The article itself characterises it as

>As the old Fox News slogan had it, “We report, you decide.”

You know, and I know that Fox News is telling you what to decide. Invoking thw words of Fox News as a claim of having a neutral agenda speaks volumes.

That Objection AI seems to have made no Judgements and seems to have paused their launch in response to feedback, would suggest that, as yet, there is no evidence that their results are unfair, because they haven't shown any yet.