Daily Archives: 4 June 2024

More Press Gaslighting

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The notoriously strongly Leftist, and commensurately biased, news outlet The Associated Press now is promising to instigate what it’s pleased to call a nonpartisan news initiative and to have it up and running before the coming national elections. The opening paragraph in the news outlet’s announcement:

The Associated Press today announced five new content sharing agreements with US nonprofit news outlets: CalMatters, Honolulu Civil Beat, Montana Free Press, Nebraska Journalism Trust, and South Dakota News Watch.

Never mind that these five outlets are themselves solidly on the left side—some farther left, some less so—of our nation’s political spectrum. Here are a couple items of interest concerning the balance we can expect from the AP‘s construct. These two new partners are openly proud of their bias.

The CEO and Publisher of Honolulu Civil Beat is Pierre Omidyar who made billions as one of the creators of eBay. Omidyar donated considerable funds to create The Intercept, and in 2016 personally donated “$100,000 to NeverTrump PAC, a political action committee dedicated to making sure New York businessman Donald Trump never becomes president of the United States,” according to Honolulu Civil Beat.

And

CalMatters is a nonprofit news organization that was cofounded by Austin resident Simone Coxe who personally donated $100,000 to a pro-Joe Biden super PAC back in 2020, according to a report from The Washington Free Beacon. Coxe and her husband Tench collectively donated $2 million to Beto O’Rourke’s 2022 presidential campaign, the Texas Tribune reported.

We’re supposed to take this new construct as balanced.

Whether the AP is making this claim of “nonpartisan-ness” deliberately or from its having gone so far Left it no longer can recognize the center of American politics, much less what’s center-right in our political spectrum, this is the news outlet gaslighting us all.

“Should AI Have Access to Your Medical Records? What if It Can Save Many Lives?”

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The Wall Street Journal asked that question last week. And their subheadline:

We asked readers: Is it worth giving up some potential privacy if the public benefit could be great?

A good many of the published answers centered on Yes, with oversight by, among others, medical professionals.

This reader (unpublished in the WSJ) says, resoundingly, No. Not now, and not for the foreseeable future, say I. Personal data aggregators, whether government or private enterprise, have shown no ability to protect our personal data, whether from hackers or from organizational carelessness, incompetence, or ignorance. With our medical data especially, very good protection, even six sigma-level protection, isn’t good enough. This is one of the few areas where perfection must be the standard. Since that’s an unachievable standard, AIs must not be permitted any access to our personal data, including our personal medical data.

There are additional reasons for saying no. One is the inherent bias programmers build into AIs. Alphabet’s overtly bigoted Gemini is an extreme example, but the programmers build their biases into AIs through the data sets they use and have their AIs use in training.

There’s also the just as overt bigotry too many medical training institutions apply through their emphasis on diversity, equity, inclusion claptrap at the expense of training actual medicine. Those institutions are producing the doctors that would the second generation of “medical” professionals doing the oversight.

In the current state of affairs, and for that foreseeable future, it’s not feasible to let AIs into any aspect of our personal lives. The blithely assumed public benefit is vastly overwhelmed by the threat to our individual privacy—the “public,” after all, is all of us individuals aggregated.