Crikey News
Bullshit'o'Meter
There's no such thing as perfectly unbiased news, but A.I.-powered news generators have the potential to turn our imperfect media landscape into a bullshit-ridden hellscape. To raise awareness of the dangers of A.I.-powered fake news, we collaborated with Crikey - Australia's most respected independent news outlets - to create the Bullshit'o'Meter; a powerful digital tool that harnesses A.I. to highlight the threat of A.I.
The Bullshit'o'Meter invited readers to select from a series of significant stories around the news story of the moment – the US election – then used bespoke LLMs (built by Pow Wow Solutions) to instantly polarise those stories from neutral reporting to near/far political left/right sensationalist slop. The tool also provided 'justifications' for textual changes, allowing readers to learn how language itself can be used as a weapon of misinformation.
The Bullshit'o'Meter allowed users to experience for themselves just how easy it is for bad faith outlets to weaponise language, and how the machines that produce it don't care what's true.
Following the success of our first crusade against media bullshit, we worked with Crikey once again - in May 2025 - for the Australian federal election. For our second collaboration, we exposed how - under Aussie electoral laws - anyone can bypass 'truth in advertising' laws (i.e. lying is legal)... so long as they're running for parliament. In order to expose this shocking truth, we ran a candidate for parliament, and told massive lies.
