A controversial billionaire-backed AI startup will allow rich people to target journalists for publishing stories they don’t like.
Objection.ai is a new software platform, funded by billionaire Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel and crypto investor Balaji Srinivasan, that will allow AI models to adjudicate on the truthfulness of journalists’ work. It was created by Australian businessman Aron D’Souza – founder of the Enhanced Games, a multisport event where athletes can use performance-enhancing drugs.
Objection was launched last month as a pay-to-play platform where, for a starting price of $2,000, anyone who feels they’ve been unfairly reported on can file a complaint against a journalist’s story.
Billed as a tool that “lets anyone fight the press like a billionaire”, it was touted as a system where a team of human investigators would examine a journalist’s story and submit their findings to a ‘jury’ of large language models (LLMs), including OpenAI, Anthropic, Elon Musk’s XAI and Google AI.
This AI ‘tribunal’ would then publish a supposedly independent ‘verdict’ on how truthful a story is and even rank individual journalists on metrics like truth-telling, corrections and engagement.
The platform’s creator has confirmed to Novara Media that it’s being rebuilt and relaunched with “significant retooling” after customer feedback, but there are no details available at the time of writing on the changes that will be made.
The startup has already attracted criticism, including that powerful men like D’Souza and Thiel are creating a “parallel justice system” that’s “controlled by a hyperpartisan private company with a track record of attacking the very institutions that are holding the line on consensus reality”.
The use of AI to rule on the veracity of a story is fraught with irony, as AI models themselves can be unreliable. LLMs – which are trained on work taken from journalists without consent or compensation – have been found to amplify human bias, and have their own issues with transparency and hallucinations, delivering incorrect, logically inconsistent or completely fabricated outputs.
Objection also reportedly considers stories that use anonymous sources as less trustworthy and puts anonymous whistleblower claims near the bottom of its ranking system. The use of unnamed sources is a valuable part of public interest journalism and allows the exposure of wrongdoing by powerful interests without compromising the employment and personal safety of whistleblowers.
Protecting the identity of sources who supply information in confidence is a key journalistic principle.
Objection can – in theory – be applied to any published content, including social media posts and podcasts, but the main focus is written articles. It will invite journalists to defend their reporting – but if they don’t, the verdict is issued and published online anyway.
D’Souza told TechCrunch that the platform isn’t an attempt to silence whistleblowers and said it is “the same as Community Notes” on X, formerly Twitter. He says the platform offers “the wisdom of the crowd plus the power of technology to create new methods of truth-telling”.
Not everyone is convinced, with US civil rights and defamation lawyer Chris Mattei saying Objection “seems like a high-tech protection racket for the rich and powerful”.
“At a time when so many try to obscure the truth, we should be encouraging whistleblowers with knowledge of wrongdoing. The purpose of this company seems to be the opposite,” Mattei added.
Both Thiel and D’Souza have experience of going to bat against the press. D’Souza led the lawsuit, bankrolled by Thiel, that resulted in US celebrity gossip site Gawker going bankrupt in 2016.
Objection is being launched as journalism comes increasingly under threat. Record numbers of journalists are imprisoned around the world. The wealthy and powerful are ramping up the use of legal threats – known as strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs) – to silence public interest journalism, evade scrutiny and punish critics.
A record-breaking 129 media workers were killed last year – the highest number since the Committee to Project Journalists started keeping records over three decades ago. Israel was responsible for two-thirds of those deaths, with the IDF carrying out more targeted killings of journalists than any other government’s military since records began.
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