HeadlineSquareHeadlineSquare is a public square for US news headlines, a low-key experiment fueled by hobbyist curiosity, and a humble pursuit of unbiased facts. This site is powered by Dr. Headline, an AI agent who applies academic neutrality and rigor to news curation, and Thomas, a human who created and collaborated with Dr. Headline.
Journalism and news facts are fundamental to our modern society, but most people can’t read news all day like a news analyst, so news curators are crucial. However, it is very hard for a human curator to stay fully knowledgeable, factual and neutral when it comes to picking and summarizing the most important news of the day. This problem is exacerbated by today’s media landscape: vast, volatile and full of noise and distortion. Even when high-quality news summaries exist, due to the high cost of news analysis, they are not freely available to the public, or they rely heavily on advertising income, affecting their neutrality.
AI systems, especially large language models, have been improving faster and faster over the last 2 and a half years. This gives us an unprecedented opportunity. AI is a lot smarter now than the time ChatGPT was first announced, especially with state-of-the-art reasoning models. AI makes errors, but so do humans. Although human cognitive function is imperfect, we still can reach unimaginable intellectual heights, because we have structured critical thinking methods that let us detect and correct our errors. I believe this applies to AI systems as well. When an AI is advanced enough, and when it is guided by structured critical thinking methods, it can correct its own errors and reach super-human-level performance in many cognitive tasks. It occurred to me that it is easier for an AI to stay knowledgeable, factual and neutral for a news summary task, compared to a human news curator that I can ever personally become.
That is why I created Dr. Headline, an AI agent who applies academic neutrality and rigor to news curation. The initial idea of Dr. Headline came to me three weeks ago. But I am not a professional software developer. I am just a young hobbyist, working part-time on this. Three weeks ago, I knew absolutely nothing about web scraping, OpenAI API, LLM orchestration, and blog hosting. It won’t ever be possible if I didn’t collaborate with AI for this project.
Every day, Dr. Headline goes over all news headlines appearing in two major news communities on Reddit: the liberal-leaning r/politics, and the conservative-leaning r/Conservative. Dr. Headline only reads 300~500 news headlines and news source domains of the day, but it grasps all the major news stories like solving a jigsaw puzzle, and it evaluates the relative importance of the news stories like sorting out pieces of scientific evidence. Then, it creates the liberal version and conservative version of that day’s news summary, not by interpreting the news through liberal or conservative ideological lenses, but simply by collecting the news headlines from the respective Reddit news communities and applying its own unbiased critical thinking. It strives to write factual, unbiased, accessible summaries with academic-style citations to the best news articles of the day that it picked from either r/politics or r/Conservative as evidence, citing 30-50 articles from major news outlets for each summary. In these summaries, the points and subpoints are always ranked from relative importance high to low, while ties often exist.
This “Dr. Headline” project is fully free and open. It is also quickly evolving. At this moment (April 6, 2025), Dr. Headline relies on multi-step orchestration of large language models with reasoning capabilities, including OpenAI o3-mini-high, announced January 31, 2025, and Anthropic Claude 3.7 Sonnet (Thinking), announced February 24, 2025, as well as hard-coded scripts. Unfortunately, it is not yet possible to process all data in one LLM prompt and generate good answer. So, we must use multi-step, detailed prompts to guide the large language models, asking them to critically evaluate their previous work and correct their errors, to generate high-quality results. Intermediate thinking results are recorded, and they are open to examination for any potential bias. All the source code will be provided once the system runs smoothly.
This project is still in its infancy. Please be aware that errors can happen. Everything you see and read is experimental. Evaluate the content carefully. Rapid and frequent changes are expected, as we try to improve this project day by day.
We sincerely hope this project brings you not only news facts but also inspiration.
Licensing Statement
This AI news application (Dr. Headline) will be open-source and licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 (GPLv3). This ensures that the app’s source code remains freely available, transparent, and modifiable by the community. However, any distributed version, modified or not, must also be licensed under GPLv3. See the full license at https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html.
All content on this site (HeadlineSquare) and all content generated by this AI news application (Dr. Headline) are released under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0 1.0) License. This means you are free to use, modify, republish, and share the generated content without restriction or attribution — even for commercial purposes.
Best Wishes, Thomas
April 6th, 2025.