For almost five months we've used Gemini to "watch" the entire TV News Archive each day and deeply analyze the underlying trends, themes and narratives seen across all of that coverage, publishing these richly researched and fully cited analyses each morning in our free email newsletters Today's Trends on Capitol Hill and Today's Media Trends. One of the single most fascinating findings that is emerging from all of that work is the degree to which Gemini has been able to bring world knowledge and sociocultural understanding to bear in distangling each day the stories that are "important" versus those that are merely "getting the most attention". Often those two are the same, with the biggest global events typically securing outsized global media coverage and public attention. But beneath that topmost thin veneer of the biggest global stories lies the ocean of daily events and narratives that attract far less attention. For most countries, especially smaller ones, the stories that dominate their national headlines for days never receive even a single mention outside their borders, while the specifics of a story, the functioning of the news cycle and elite interference can all play roles in artificially increasing or decreasing the visibility and coverage of a given story.
Historically, GDELT assessed the "importance" of an event like a protest, official statement, attack or other action by the volume of media coverage it received. If a protest of 100 people that yielded mass arrests received just two mentions on the day's news then it was likely to have less societal impact than a statement by a local politician that dominated the news cycle for days, at least under this formulation. While highly imperfect, this concept of measuring attention ("production") as a proxy for the invisible unmeasurable variable of "importance" was the best available metric we had that could be robustly instantiated in fully automated workflows for the past several decades.
Recently, however, Gemini has proved increasingly capable of advanced sociocultural contextualization in which it brings to bear rich domain knowledge to identify the significance of a given event or narrative, regardless of how much coverage it has received. Read through our Today's Media Trends reports each morning and you will see reams of stories and developments discussed in the analysis that may have received just a single or a few mentions on the previous day's coverage, but Gemini correctly assessed that despite its barren coverage, its significance to the day's developments far exceeded the limited attention the media paid to it.
In our experiments to date, Gemini has proven especially good at assessing what developments and statements are "significant" to a given country/culture versus another, leveraging deep cultural knowledge. We are beginning to explore how we might integrate these assessments into our broader conflict and stability assessment scoring across the world.