Knowhere: Creating Impartial News via AI
Knowhere, a San Francisco- and London-based startup, is an AI-based news aggregator that uses machine learning to eliminate bias in trending news by creating an impartial, left and right-leaning version of each news item. The objective of this startup is to provide a balanced perspective on trending news items to the readers and provide the real truth behind daily news.
The company came out of stealth in April with a $1.8 million investment in seed funding. Investors include CrunchFund, Day One Ventures, Danhua Capital, Struck Capital and Abstract Ventures.
“Fake news, the Russia misinformation scandal, and all of these issues that are at the top of the Zeitgeist at the moment are all symptoms of a fundamental problem that information moves too fast and at too large a scale for us to be able to reliably parse it and understand the world as human beings,” Knowhere editor-in-chief and cofounder Nathaniel Barling
(Ref: Motherboard)
The tool is able to create three versions of each story very quickly - varying from 60 seconds to 15 minutes as per the complexity of the story. At this point of time, at least two human editors review the work for errors, style, and bias in the impartial versions of the stories and further train the algorithms.
Knowhere does not publish a story until at least five verified sources have previously written about the topic. Thus, it cannot break new stories or report direct quotes from sources on platforms like social media.
The rise of Fake News in the digital media industry is becoming a global problem. This startup can be a strong response to this growing problem with its ability to provide truthful versions of news items.
The future path for this startup, as well as few others who are working on similar tools to eliminate fake news, may not be easy as it will take a long time and a lot of technological improvements to overcome this challenging and complex problem. However, we can safely assume that this may well be the future of journalism!