A Peter Thiel-Backed AI 'Tribunal of Truth' Just Launched. It Stinks.
Diving deep on Objection, a startup that's supposed to disrupt the journalism industry, but is mostly just bewildering.
There have been lots of ridiculous AI-centric startups and rebrands of late—the shoe company Allbirds is starting over as a “AI-native cloud solutions provider,” for instance—but I suspect it will be hard to top the absurdity of a new, tech-funded journalism watchdog.
I am referring to Objection, which launched on Wednesday as an expensive and convoluted alternative to X’s Community Notes feature. Ordinarily, I would not blog about a seed-funded project that’s premised on taking one of Elon Musk’s worst ideas to the next level. But Objection is reportedly backed by Peter Thiel and Balaji Srinivasan, among others, and so I cannot quite dismiss it out of hand—at least, not until it fails on the merits.
Objection is the brainchild of Aron D’Souza, an attorney who schemed with Thiel a decade ago to bankrupt Gawker. It seems Thiel is now lending his old friend an assist (assuming D’Souza is telling the truth about Objection’s financial support). D’Souza describes Objection as an “AI tribunal” that “gives everyone a fast, affordable, evidence-based way to dispute statements in the media.” I would say “everyone” and “affordable” are a stretch; it costs at least $2,000 to lodge a media complaint with Objection—and that doesn’t apply to entire articles. If David Sacks wants to dispute four pieces of reporting in an exposé about his crypto and AI assets, he’s gotta pay up per complaint.
Objection is for wealthy people who hope to spin up a counter narrative as quickly as possible. The swiftness of the AI tribunal is one of D’Souza’s selling points; he claims his platform issues a “verdict” (my scare quotes) within a couple of days, as opposed to the years it can take to sue for defamation. Luckily for D’Souza, there are lots of aggrieved founders and oligarchs and MAGA influencers right now. On X, there’s been near-nonstop chatter about how Wired isn’t writing enough fawning articles about tech CEOs. The “All-In” podcast hosts are mad at a half-dozen New York Times articles at any given moment. “Fake news” is still the go-to line for anyone in Trumpworld who ends up on their back foot.
I’m going to provide a hypothetical about how Objection is supposed to work, at least as I best understand it from reviewing its terms of service and arbitration rules. (I also slogged through a TBPN segment where newly minted OpenAI employees John Coogan and Jordi Hays briefly interviewed D’Souza.)
Let’s say I’d like to interview D’Souza for a story in Every Founder Is a Genius magazine about how he’s an entrepreneurial virtuoso. I reach out to him, and he says yes, I will do an on-the-record interview, but on the condition that we both sign an “Objection Protection” form. The form is an arbitration agreement establishing that if D’Souza later takes issue with a portion of my reporting, he can file a complaint through the Objection platform. By signing the form, I “acknowledge, accept, and desire the high-speed, high-efficiency, AI-assisted nature of the Objection process.” I also “agree to be legally bound by any determination made therein.”
Put another way, D’Souza is asking journalists to preemptively agree to the possibility of financial penalties set forth by an AI tribunal and/or the guy who helped bankrupt Gawker—all in exchange for an on-the-record interview with someone who is indicating they are paranoid and hoping to pick a fight.
No journalist will ever, ever, ever agree to this arrangement. In the real, non-hypothetical world, if I reach out to a source for an interview and they send me back an arbitration agreement from a Peter Thiel-funded website, my response will be, “What?” Then I will say, “That’s not how this stuff works. Do you want to do an interview or not?” Assuming they reiterate their desire to only speak with me if I agree to Objection Protection, I will instead write my story, report on our odd back-and-forth, reach out one more time prior to publication, and note that they declined comment.
Okay, back to my hypothetical. Let’s say I sign the Objection Protection agreement. I also sign up for an account on Objection, which grants me a verified profile page. I interview D’Souza, write my story, and then it’s published in Every Founder Is a Genius magazine. I am effusive in my praise of D’Souza’s intelligence and vision, but he’s not happy. My profile notes that D’Souza played a meaningful role in taking down Gawker, but it does not characterize him as the mastermind of the lawsuit that bankrupted the site. To D’Souza, this is a grave misrepresentation; we have a factual dispute to settle. He files an Objection against my reporting.
Because I am a verified Objection user, I automatically receive an email notification that a complaint has been filed. I am graciously allowed an opportunity to submit a rebuttal to the complaint via the Objection platform. Meanwhile, an “independent investigator” (fee: $5,000) does their own research into the complaint. D’Souza claims that Objection has a fleet of former CIA and FBI agents doing the independent investigations. What are they researching, exactly? If recent “open cases” are to be believed, the investigators are reading many of the same materials that journalists have already come across during their own reporting. I also spotted a submission of evidence that was quite literally just a Wikipedia summary.
The investigators reserve the right to contact my sources—in the case of my hypothetical, I guess that’d mean D’Souza himself. What happens if someone files a complaint over an anonymously sourced claim? D’Souza doesn’t quite know how to deal with this obvious logistical issue—his investigators (who are anonymous, by the way)—wouldn’t know where to start. Simple solution: disparage the use of anonymous sources entirely. D’Souza told TBPN that if you take a “scientific method” approach to journalism, then anonymous sources should never be allowed. That standard would mean no more public reporting about anyone in a position of power, and it ignores the many extra layers of fact-checking and corroboration that journalists and editors engage in when they aren’t citing a source by name. Nevertheless, Objection weighs anonymous sourcing as borderline-useless.
In my hypothetical, I don’t have any anonymous sourcing. However, as the arbitration process progresses, the claimant is nevertheless allowed to request that I unpublish my Every Founder Is a Genius article. My made-up editor is not thrilled about this—in fact they have never heard of anything like it—but they defer to Objection, the platform for truth. They’re mindful of my arbitration agreement: if I don’t temporarily remove the article, and then the AI tribunal finds me liable, I am subject to a 15% increase in damages.
Once I and the independent investigator have submitted our evidence, the AI tribunal takes over. The tribunal is a collection of up to seven LLMs that are prompted to be impartial jury members. The LLMs conduct their own analysis of the data they’re given, and then issue a verdict for all to see on the Objection platform. During his interview with TBPN, D’Souza claimed that a University of Chicago study found AI “applies the law 100% accurately,” a much higher ratio than human judges. What the paper actually found is that when a GPT model and human judges are presented with the same batch of cases, the GPT model is much more likely to make its rulings based on judicial precedent, while the human judges are much more likely to be swayed by sympathetic details. This is an age-old tension known as legal formalism versus legal realism, as laid out in a summary of the study by Forbes. The study’s own authors didn’t even render a firm opinion on whether they thought GPT or human judges were “better.”
Hilariously, Objection’s all-caps fine print demonstrate some trust issues with the supposedly much more accurate LLMs: “WE MAY INCORPORATE HUMAN REVIEW OR OVERSIGHT AT STAGES OF THE ADJUDICATION PROCESS, INCLUDING IN CASES INVOLVING NOVEL, COMPLEX, OR SENSITIVE ISSUES. THE LEVEL OF AUTOMATION OR HUMAN INVOLVEMENT MAY VARY DEPENDING ON THE CIRCUMSTANCES.”
In other words, complex complaints will have more human oversight, not less. Our hypothetical case is not very complex, and the AI tribunal returns with an unexpected verdict: an inconclusive ruling! (This is a possible outcome, according to Objection.) I don’t owe D’Souza damages, but because of the inconclusive ruling, he does receive a 30% refund in site credits for the next time he wants to file a complaint against a journalist. My hypothetical, verified author page is updated to reflect that I engaged in good faith with the AI tribunal. This is good for me and my career, says Objection: “Authors who participate constructively build durable reputational capital regardless of the verdict.”
If you are a journalist who’s not necessarily driven by the prospect of “building durable reputational capital” on Objection, then I have good news: you don’t actually have to work with the platform at all. “Without a previous Objection arbitration agreement, participation… is entirely voluntary,” states Objection’s terms and conditions. If journalists ignore Objection entirely, then the best-case scenario for an Objection complainant is that they spend a fair amount of money, and then a combination of LLMs might conclude that the complainant has a point. That’s it. The “decision” is not legally binding, there are no financial penalties and no retractions by the news outlet. The Objection X account will post something about how the complainant was vindicated. A notarized Community Note, basically.
D’Souza told the TBPN guys that “truth is not a vibe, truth is a process.” Chills and bars. He’s right, but he fundamentally misunderstands the purpose and point of journalism.
The best-known investigations of the last century have rarely contained a formal conclusion or a smoking gun. Many are sprawling, multi-part series that come out in dribs and drabs; with each entry, public interest grows, and additional sources (mostly anonymous ones, by the way) decide to come forward. These reports surface provocative questions and theories. They contextualize important bits of news. They are intended to get to the truth while being responsible and fair to all parties.
Sometimes, journalists do get things wrong. Other times, their coverage falls short. There are already plenty of ways to adjudicate mistakes and plenty of avenues to thoughtfully debate a story’s framing.
There is no need for, and no use for, an arbiter like Objection. Put simply, the platform is just another release valve to appease prominent figures who are frustrated that they’re subject to scrutiny. They can absolutely waste their money oohing and aahing at how an AI jury consisting of Grok and Gemini and Claude says they’re right and a meanie journalist is wrong, but I’m doubtful many will ultimately do so. Even the TBPN guys couldn’t muster much enthusiasm for Objection during their interview with D’Souza. When Coogan kicked it to Hays and asked if he had anything else to ask, Hays briefly paused, then drolly said, “Excited to follow along.” Me too.