A lot of people are going to do a small, ordinary thing this week. They will photograph a sample ballot, or a flyer for a local candidate, and hand the picture to a chatbot. Tell me about these people. I wrote about that habit yesterday, and the hole in the middle of it. Today the subject is bigger, because the same reflex now covers everything. Ask the model, get the summary, move on.
It is worth being honest about what that involves. These systems are not always accurate. They hallucinate. I am not saying that to cause panic — it is just a reality of the tool, and it is different from a search engine. A search engine sends you somewhere. You click a link, you read what a person wrote, and you can see who published it. A model hands you the answer itself, with no detour, in the same confident voice whether it is right or not. That is a real change in how information reaches people, and I think we are all still adjusting to it, me included.
The protests in France
If you want to see the problem at full size, look at France. There have been mass protests there for weeks. They started with high school students angry about crowded, under-resourced schools, and grew from there. Unions joined. So did people furious about the cost of living. Euronews has a good account of how the student movement pulled adults in, including the police response that did it. On October 17 the crowds were enormous by any measure — the interior minister put the national figure around 550,000, the CGT union said more — and there was violence in several cities. Parts of Paris and Lyon are under curfew now. The curfews seem to have calmed things for a couple of days, and new marches are called for this week.
Here is the part I keep running into: the coverage. Read a few American stories about the protests and you will often not be told why they are happening. The cause is a tangle — schools, living costs, fuel prices, a heavy police response — and a tangle does not compress well into two paragraphs. I am not on the ground and I am not claiming special knowledge. What I noticed, trying to read about France from several directions, is how much the stories leave out. The same week, Albania had its own student protests — days of clashes in Tirana over education costs, the prime minister refusing to resign, hundreds injured — and a news organization I read in the United States missed it entirely. I only know about it because I went looking.
The midterms get the same treatment
The pattern shows up at home too. This year’s midterms keep getting boiled down to one or two causes, depending on who is doing the boiling. It might be affordability, or disappointment with the president, or a particular mixture each voter carries around. Listen to a few political podcasts and you will hear each version delivered with total confidence. I do not have the answers. What I do know is that the realities voters are facing this year are complex, more than one thing is true at the same time, and a summary that fits in one paragraph is not the reality.
Now put the two pieces together. The reporters writing the stories are using these models for background — that is the open secret of the newsroom right now — and the models are built to hand back something clean and readable. A complicated situation goes in; two tidy paragraphs come out. The tidy paragraphs get published. Then somebody asks a chatbot to summarize the article, and the chatbot tidies it further. Every pass in the chain loses a little more of what actually happened, and none of the passes are required to say what they dropped.
Go past the summary
I am not writing this to scare anyone off the tools. I use them. They are good at first drafts and bad at being the only source, and the difference matters most right now, with an election this week and two countries in the street. If you ask a model to summarize the midterms, you will get a simple answer, and there is a decent chance the answer will agree with whatever you have already told it about your own politics. That was the mirror in yesterday’s post. It does not stop being a mirror when the subject is world events.
So the small, unglamorous habit is this: when a summary matters — a candidate, a protest, a war — ask what the model left out. Click one of the sources. Check whether the other side of the situation is being covered at all. The models did not break our picture of the world. They made it easier to never notice the picture was missing. That is the harder thing to come to terms with, and I do not think anyone has come to terms with it yet.
If this is your kind of problem, it is the subject of my book, The World That Agrees With You, available in paperback and Kindle.