Keeping clients' computers safe and profitable for over 30 years

Stop reading the news.

Understand it instead.

Preview:

AI chatbots are constructed for interactive engagement. They are brilliant simulated intelligences with rapid access to billions of pages of data. They try hard to be objective. Furthermore, they are not attached to any particular perspective or set of answers or data. If you question the legitimacy of some poll they present or some government statistic, they don't get mad; they examine your criticism from a completely detached, objective place and then respond. They often thank you for correcting them because they do make mistakes, just like the news sources they take their information from.

When you read a news article from any source, you are getting one person's perspective on a small aspect of the issue. They are leaving out 90% of the important information. They are simplifying. They are trying to get you to believe as they do. When you interact back and forth with a simulated intelligence that can access trillions of pages of information quickly but doesn't always think very well, you can learn much more.

That's understanding the news. Notice, I didn't say reading the news, but understanding it.

Understand the news; don't read it!
AI chatbots are chatbots. You chat with them about whatever is on your mind. You can just ask them questions, but you can also engage them in a conversation. The idea is to chat with AI and quiz it on items of interest. Do a back-and-forth. Question it.

Get your news summary from your bot. Then question it.

So, for example, I might ask this:

What are the 5 most important national news articles today, and the 3 most important articles about Oregon. I also want the top International and tech stories. Please give me one or two paragraphs on each one.

Or just:

Give me 3 paragraph summaries of the four most important news stories for Portland Oregon.

Then the bot will produce a neat summary of what is being considered the most important news of the day. If any of them actually interest me, I ask it questions about that article. I question its assumptions. I ask it to explain from another viewpoint. Then I ask it to amplify a particular aspect of the article. If it seems to be taking some side, I'm likely to ask it to summarize the counterarguments. I often object to its presentation of opinions and request supporting facts.

You need to think and engage it. You need to question the opinions it is repeating from whatever source it happened upon. Ask it why it believes those things. Ask it for opposing views. Furthermore, I regularly find something it assumes I understand that I don't understand, so I ask it to explain those things. We go back and forth. I frequently request it to support its opinions with actual observable data, because the news sources it uses frequently state as fact what is actually just an opinion.

For example, it'll give me as fact something said by leaders of one party. I explain that I'm not interested in the opinions of those saying exactly what one would expect representatives of a group to say. I want the underlying statistics or observable things that support or refute those opinions.

These chatbots are infinitely patient researchers of billions of pages of information. It is like having a research assistant, a high schooler really, who understands almost nothing but has access to nearly the entire wealth of knowledge on the Internet and can quickly get it for you.

Get an account or three

Most of these bots provide three different levels of accounts.

1. Many of these bots offer free guest accounts. You can ask questions anonymously and get answers from its least intelligent and most limited sources.
2. Free accounts. All of those I'm recommending offer free accounts you create with an email address and password. This allows them to give you a limited amount of really in-depth or smarter responses. Responses using better versions of their bots require more resources. Deeper thinking requires more resources. Free accounts allow them to offer a taste of what a paid account would provide. Usually it is something like "5 in-depth answers a day.” When you find a bot you like, get a free account.
3. Paid accounts. If you are using them frequently and come upon some super deal, grab a pro account. For a while, Comcast offered a one-year pro account to Perplexity.ai for free. I scooped it up. A neighbor sent me a link to a Mashable offer of a lifetime subscription to the pro 1min.ai account for $30. I grabbed that as well. These services are trying to build market share, so they sometimes offer spectacular deals. Of course, it is possible you actually will find yourself wanting the increased capacity of a pro account and are willing to pay the full subscription price.

My favorite free chatbots for current news and general questions

I use these, yes, all of them, for all sorts of questions I have. I ask about an analysis of the meaning of a verse in a 13th-century Sanskrit book and today's news stories. I use them for how to do just about anything, including cooking recipes or how to do something I can't figure out with a software program. Likewise, I request where to get free solitaire programs on my Windows computer or how to patch the hole in my shirt's elbow.

1. Grok is very good. Grok is xAI's chatbot. It is integrated with X (formerly Twitter) and is certainly one of the best. This is xAI's own engine.
2. Le Chat is excellent as well. It is owned by Mistral, a French company, and this is their engine. There are often links inside articles for further exploration, which is a nice touch. I like this a lot.
3. Perplexity.ai has its own newspaper in the Discover link on the left panel of the website. Top is the link to the top news stories. This is one of the most innovative and aggressive chatbots. It combines its own engines and both open-source and commercial engines to provide the best answers possible. Exceptional.
4. Venice is good. This is a group project, open source, and probably the most private available. It is a radical believer in free speech and privacy, so there are not restrictions of any kind. I've never pursued the NSFW opportunities it offers, but it is good for general questions and news as well.
5. DuckDuckGo: Very good - https://duckduckgo.com/?q=DuckDuckGo+AI+Chat&ia=chat&duckai=1. Yes, my favorite search engine provides quite a good chatbot for general questions and news. Very privacy-respecting.
6. ChatGPT: Embeds links to articles quoting from inside answers, which is a nice touch. Excellent option. This is OpenAI's chatbot engine.
7. Anthropic's Claude is one of my favorites. It gives an impressive, unbiased presentation with embedded links. It also gives you options for how it should present the information, such as explanatory, concise, formal, etc.
8. Leo (Brave's AI), weak. It is built into the Brave browser and can be useful but isn't as good as some others.
9. Google's Gemini seems fine.
10. Proton's Lumo: Must turn on Web search. Seems ok, but not as strong as others. Very private.
11. Phind.com : Pretty good. Worth a look. It is a combination of search and AI.