this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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The Intercept conservative?! The Nation conservative?! What gives?

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[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Just because you don't like the top result doesn't mean it is irrelevant EDIT: I am in fact an asshole. I see the problem now 😂

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago

True, but I don't think those periodicals would normally (or ever) characterize themselves that way.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

You're not an asshole, no worries 🙂

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah where are those descriptions coming from? Also mentions “the strike workers’ strike” and repeats “politics” twice

[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Seems like a poorly trained ML model - crudely speaking, perhaps its training set was tilted towards descriptions of conservative news sites so it learned to insert the word "conservative" when describing a news site.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't want to jump to conclusions, but that does sound like a very possible explanation.

Poo. I was hoping DDG would keep LLM-generated summaries out of their UI.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

My guess is that they're surfacing something from Bing rather than doing this themselves. Still Not Good, though.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That makes it sound like an outdated LLM, like GPT-2 or something. You think it is?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Alas, not smart enough to know 🙁

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Im still looking for the weird thing going on at duckduck

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm on Fennec, searching DuckDuck from the address bar. Here's another one:

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Weird I just searched and got totally different text, can't upload the screens screenshot tho

A Current Affairs subscription is one of the best known ways to improve your life in a hurry. Our print magazine is released six times a year, in a beautiful full-color edition full of elegant design, sophisticated prose, and satirical advertisements. Tell me more How Anti-Homeless Sentiment Made Its Way Into Popular Cartoons Alex Skopic

The Dangerous Populist Science of Yuval Noah

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Checked with startpage & DDG, got the same as this guy times soo...

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It did the same for me.

I clicked on the link then went back and the description calling it conservative was gone.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

And it came back lol. Wild man.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It showed me the same thing, but after searching again a few times I'm now seeing a summary of the articles on their homepages.

Side note: I've had a weird bug a few times with DDG lately, where it showed me results for current events that were completely unrelated to what I was looking for. I searched for something like "10 inch chef's knife" but the results were as though I had typed "US house of representatives speaker." This has happened maybe three or four times in the last two weeks.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

DDG going hard with horseshoe theory

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Even using searxng it comes up with Google & qwant show it as conservative. But allsides has it left leaning bias.

https://www.allsides.com/news-source/intercept

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Interesting that allsides has The Atlantic as being on the liberal side of things; Mrs. Hedge describes it as "a make work project for unemployed neocons." David Frum, the "axis of evil" guy, is a regular contributor there .

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Outside the US that term is usually used for market liberalism.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Same for Media Bias / Fact Check.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-intercept/

Could not find anything in the source code related to that either so I'm not sure from where that description is pulled from.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Are they just using "conservative" as a synonym for something like "political"?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I'm getting the same results as this person. Not the weird ones like the original post

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@hedge because they aren't using the political compass. Two or three political dimensions with only two words describing them leads to meaningless labeling.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

That would explain it! I think I remember seeing Jacobin as being the same degree of liberal as The Atlantic, and there's no way that could be right! Oops, I mean "correct." 🙄