If humans sometimes can’t tell the difference between a review and satire, it is definitely no surprise that a sophistocated Google News algo (+ human editor help?) cannot.

Disclaimer: I am a Blogcritics contributer and have been for well over a year now. My recent film review of House of Wax was correctly identified by Google News as news and not satire.

The screenshot above shows that Google News categorized all of last night’s American Idol coverage on Blogcritics.org as ’satire.’

The problem? It wasn’t.

The writer behind one story, Sticker comments:

note to gentle readers:

for some reason, this article is coming up on google as blogcritics (satire).

i can assure you it is not satire. it may have some sass in it, as par for the course, but—except to the extent that all life is somewhere on the continuum of satire–it’s not satirical in the least!

thank you.

Sticker

Blogcritics publisher, Eric Olsen, confirms in a follow-up comment that it wasn’t just the one writer’s AI piece, it was all AI pieces in Google News.

I wonder if a human editor mistakenly marked off last night’s American Idol coverage as ’satire’? Some of what is on Blogcritics is definitely satire (they have a specific category for that, in fact), so I can see this mistake happening on an article here and there, but all articles for a specific topic? Hmm. Also, I can’t remember even one satirical piece over there on American Idol.

Another reason why Google News is probably still in beta. Issues like this are thorny programatically to sort out, but hopefully the Google News team will be more careful about blanket categorization in the future of any one source. Wonder if their proposed TrustRank would/will help in situations like this?

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