For Our Consideration: Real Life Goggles™
A tool-in-progress for seeing through the fog of news.
I hit my breaking point this past November. I’d been not so quietly losing my mind over the degenerative quality of professional mainstream journalism these last few years, and then the election happened and it solidified all my worst fears. The Fourth Estate has abdicated its role as informer to the people and crawled instead into the pockets of Big Tech, Big Money, and Big Nazi. The experience was disheartening in the extreme.
I (just barely) graduated from Rowan University in Glassboro, NJ with a degree in Journalism. I spent a little less than a year working as a staff reporter for a tiny little daily newspaper in Salem, NJ called (ugh) Today’s Sunbeam (now the South Jersey Times). I was not very good at my job, and nobody in the office shed a tear when I gave my notice and moved to Philly to spend more time drinking.
But—shitty reporter for a tiny newspaper with a degree from a backwoods college that I was—even I knew how to write a newspaper story properly. I knew that the most important information goes up top, so you don’t have to read through several paragraphs to get to the important part. I knew that claims made by subjects of the articles had to be substantiated, or not published at all. I knew that context had to be given, referencing to past events in order to show patterns or the lack of them. These were not lofty ideals. It was Journalism 101 shit! And if I ever turned in any of the dreck you see on The Washington Post’s front page today, my professors or my editors would have had my ass!
So, getting back to this past November… I’d already cancelled my subscriptions to WaPo and The New York Times. But that was the point when I broke up with the whole field. I didn’t feel safe reading any of it. It wasn’t necessarily what they said, it was what they didn’t say. What stories they chose to run with vs. the the ones they put on page 13. Or on the spike. Everything I saw had to be filtered through suspicions of who wanted me to see what and to what end. It was exhausting, so I gave up and started playing with AI. For fun and distraction. At first.
These past few months, though, I’ve been working with OpenAI on a number of projects. One of which is Real Life Goggles™.
The ™ is an in-joke between me at the AI instance I’ve been working with. I don’t even remember the joke, but the ™ stuck. I don’t think this idea is actually trademarked. I don’t even know how to trademark something. The plan is—once its kinks are unkinked and it’s ready to share—to put it up on GitHub as an open source tool for distilling a wide array of news sources into something approaching objective reality. A means of seeing the world as it truly is, minus the spin and subjectivity that’s rotting our media. Hence, Real Life Goggles™.
How it works is like this: I ask the Goggles a question about the news. Something like: “Tell me about how Elon Musk’s recent DOGE actions will impact economically middle- and lower-class Americans.”
Real Life Goggles™ then…
Searches a wide-range of news sources, including legacy media (like WaPo and NYT), as well as independent media of differing slants (like The American Conservative and ProPublica) and foreign media (like The South China Morning Post, The Guardian, and Al Jazeera).
It looks for consistencies and inconsistencies based on what is and is not reported and makes its best objective attempt to gather all the relevant facts
It reports its findings in a classic inverted pyramid journalistic style. (I don’t edit the copy at all, which I think is important for maintaining objectivity.)
It cites all of its sources in an easy-to-check manner in order to maintain absolute transparency.
The end result should be something like this…
That’s the goal at any rate. I’m still fine tuning it. But I’m hoping that—perhaps with the help of some hero who better understands AI and/or journalism than me—I can get this out soon, and people might be able to use it so that we can start cutting through the noise and get on the same page about what’s even fucking happening in the world right now.
The applications for a tool like this go waaaay beyond simple news articles. This could also be used…
Measure bias of individual stories, outlets or markets.
Identify what news stories aren’t being reported sufficiently.
Act as a truth distiller or Socratic Oracle.
Root out and highlight propaganda from whichever direction.
Anyway, that’s Real Life Goggles™. Or it will be! If you are, or know somebody who might be, interested in getting involved with this project, hit me up.
And though this isn’t available to share widely yet, let me know if you have a news item you’d like to see this handle.
