[HN Gopher] Summarizing Books with Human Feedback
___________________________________________________________________
Summarizing Books with Human Feedback
Author : atg_abhishek
Score : 74 points
Date : 2021-09-24 14:58 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (openai.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (openai.com)
| Causality1 wrote:
| It would be great if this works well. I've noticed it's something
| that doesn't really exist. If a book is extremely popular it
| might have a good plot summary on Wikipedia but if not all you're
| going to get is one or two teaser paragraphs.
|
| I often find myself wanting to continue a series that I didn't
| finish or just had a book come out without rereading all the
| previous ones. Having a big compendium of five-page plot
| summaries would be incredible.
| djoldman wrote:
| Paper:
|
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.10862.pdf
| abc_lisper wrote:
| This can't come fast enough. Could be used to filter out
| pervasive false hoods spewed on social media
| falcor84 wrote:
| How? What's to stop the AI (and/or humans in the loop) from
| spreading falsehoods?
| abc_lisper wrote:
| Other AIs. Because we can summarize well, we would be able to
| filter out extraneous data and figure out the actual intent
| better.
| TOMDM wrote:
| People aren't spewing falsehoods for a lack of people pointing
| out the truth, they do so in spite of the truth presented to
| them.
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| People desire alternative stories because they distrust those
| who are telling the main story, not because they lack good text
| or tools.
|
| You'll be providing with the right AI-written story, but
| they'll still go read something else -- unless you can convince
| them that you're on their side (not with stories but actual-
| life-changing stuff). But we're not working on that and prefer
| toying with tools and algos.
| dloss wrote:
| Good. Now summarize Wikipedia.
| djoldman wrote:
| Example ("The Great Gatsby"):
|
| The narrator, a Yale graduate, moves to New York to learn the
| bond business. He meets Gatsby, a man from a wealthy Midwest
| family who attended Oxford. Gatsby invites the narrator to lunch
| and shows him his war medals.
|
| Gatsby wants Daisy to tell Tom she never loved him and wants to
| go back to Louisville to get married as they had planned 5 years
| ago.
|
| Mrs. Wilson is killed by a car that doesn't stop. Gatsby says he
| tried to stop Daisy from driving, but she couldn't, so he pulled
| on the emergency brake.
|
| After two years, Nick remembers the police and photographers at
| Gatsby's house after his death.
|
| On the last night, Nick looks at Gatsby's house one last time.
| timgilbert wrote:
| That's... kind of a rubbish summary, but I'm not sure what I'd
| want a ~700-word summary of The Great Gatsby to look like.
| LeonardoTolstoy wrote:
| Honestly, I think you could do worse than the Wikipedia
| summary. That is maybe a bit too long (I can't remember the
| Wikipedia guidelines for books) it looks longer than 700
| words. But from there I think you could fashion a solid 700
| word summary of the book without too much trouble.
| tschwimmer wrote:
| This is truly an awful summary. It is factually correct but
| completely misses any nuance or description of themes that make
| The Great Gatsby a notable work.
|
| I doubt this has any value for what is considered to be
| literature, and probably isn't very useful for most of the rest
| of fiction either. I'd be curious to see this be used on dense
| non-fiction to extract the salient points (I'm imagining this
| being run on Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century), but based
| on this sample I'm not optimistic.
| herbertl wrote:
| This is particularly relevant to yesterday's discussion on books
| that are too long: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28636074
| mercurialsolo wrote:
| A bunch of similar summaries around movies which have been doing
| the round at YouTube.
|
| I wonder what the purpose of such summaries is - is it to define
| the plot section ala Wikipedia movie plots or IMDB plots or is it
| for really condensing knowledge into abstracts.
|
| The latter does require a certain degree of both cognition around
| the domain as well creative writing to make it engaging.
| beckman466 wrote:
| Why don't we instead give all humans full universal access to all
| knowledge, science and technology, instead of feeding books into
| black box 'AI' for 'summaries'?
|
| Why should an 'AI' have universal access to this material, and
| not the working class? Especially the working class in the global
| south. They are so far from universal access. It's only a matter
| of time before the capitalist academia comes down on emancipatory
| initiatives/projects (yet capital disrupting), like Sci-Hub.
|
| I write 'AI' because i see the pursuit of a general artificial
| intelligence in the labs of the propertied class (on their own
| profit-seeking, commons-hostile terms), despite the fact that
| there is widespread suffering caused by today's global production
| system, as a disgusting joke.
|
| The supposed inevitability of today's widespread suffering across
| the world is a false truth pulled over our eyes by the propertied
| class.
|
| World peace and full equality in this new digital age is a matter
| of priorities.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Leaving aside weapon and security purposes, full-length book
| summary strikes me as especially dystopian.
|
| In truth, I think this is something AI is capable of doing, but
| are we really comfortable in passing information through an
| interface where we cannot even know what is lost.
|
| This topic begs so many questions that I guess are not unique to
| this problem. Who is all of this intelligence for, though?
|
| What if we forget how to write well?
| DennisP wrote:
| It's not like summaries have to entirely replace whole books.
|
| Personally I have a library on my kindle that's too much for me
| to read in full, considering I'm constantly adding to it. I
| read a lot of books but good summaries strike me as an
| improvement for the cases where I either never get to a book,
| or just read its first several chapters.
|
| For the books I do fully read, summaries could make for nice
| reviews. With some further development, it seems this
| technology could turn the summaries into quiz questions, which
| would really help lock in long-term learning.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Oh I'm not dissing this particular endeavour or anything-I
| more meant to point out that I was surprised by my own
| initial reaction was so negative. There are certainly uses
| for summaries, and by no means does a summary replace the
| existence of the original text.
| woko wrote:
| Keep in mind that the real goal here was to "test scalable
| alignment techniques", and OpenAI ended up adopting
| "recursive task decomposition".
|
| That is basically a "divide and conquer" approach for
| simultaneously learning a complex task *and* allowing
| humans to evaluate it.
|
| > To test scalable alignment techniques, we trained a model
| to summarize entire books. [...] This work is part of our
| ongoing research into aligning advanced AI systems, which
| is key to our mission. As we train our models to do
| increasingly complex tasks, making informed evaluations of
| the models' outputs will become increasingly difficult for
| humans. [...] Our progress on book summarization is the
| first large-scale empirical work on scaling alignment
| techniques.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-09-24 23:01 UTC)