[HN Gopher] Clarity Reader: LLM powered depth-first reading for ...
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       Clarity Reader: LLM powered depth-first reading for complex
       documents
        
       Author : yunyu
       Score  : 42 points
       Date   : 2023-04-25 16:30 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | m3kw9 wrote:
       | I feel this is adding an extra layer on top of summarization
       | where you will now also need to trust where the partial summary
       | leads to in addition to trusting the summary didn't miss main
       | points
        
       | jxdxbx wrote:
       | If you promote things like this as research tools, ways to
       | extract technical information quickly from complex documents, hey
       | cool. Trying to frame your product as an alternative to
       | "traditional reading" makes me want to barf.
        
         | kordlessagain wrote:
         | Yet, consuming books and websites will fundamentally change in
         | the next few years. There is little reason to have nausea over
         | alternate forms of content consumption.
        
           | SpaceManNabs wrote:
           | Consuming always changes. The process for internalizing
           | knowledge stays the same. It will always be in-depth
           | deliberate practice, spaced repetition or repeated use, and
           | time.
           | 
           | When you rely on something else to chunk the knowledge for
           | you, you aren't doing the work.
           | 
           | These tools will be great when they don't miss the details
           | relevant to you, but how are you getting the signal when they
           | do miss details for you?
           | 
           | Same thing with Plato and writing. Writing did not limit
           | memory for those that treated writing as a tool. Writing
           | enabled the throughput of putting stuff into long term memory
           | for many scholars. It also encouraged new ways of work. But a
           | reference or summary could never replace what you put in your
           | head.
        
         | koboll wrote:
         | Skimming has been a valid alternative to traditional reading
         | under certain circumstances since the dawn of the written word;
         | I don't see why this is any more offensive.
        
       | koboll wrote:
       | Very cool! Demo doesn't seem to work with PDFs though; that would
       | be a useful feature.
        
       | hackernoteng wrote:
       | I think its actually pretty cool but I would also see it in
       | reverse, to have highlighted passages while reading the log form
       | - click to view a relevant summary of why that passage is
       | important point in the longer doc
        
       | danShumway wrote:
       | The question that always needs to be asked (and ideally should
       | have a section in the readme): What are the limits to what prompt
       | injection can do with this?
       | 
       | - Does the app support embedded LLM-generated links/images
       | (either through HTML or Markdown)?
       | 
       | - Is there any long-term reading history being stored (even
       | locally) that the LLM has access to and that could be included in
       | an exfiltration attack?
       | 
       | - Are there plans to offer external hosting with user accounts,
       | and if so, see above question about image/link support again.
       | 
       | With any LLM tool like this, the answer to "is it vulnerable to
       | prompt injection" is "yes", so the actual question is "how much
       | is the app doing, how bad would prompt injection be?"
       | 
       | In this case, from what I can tell, it's just a self-hosted
       | summary tool, so prompt injection would be limited to a website
       | getting the LLM to generate inaccurate summaries. It doesn't look
       | like the LLM has the ability to insert links/images, but I
       | haven't tested in more detail to make sure. So threat seems
       | minimal?
       | 
       | But I really encourage projects like this to add sections to
       | their README files spelling that out more explicitly. We need to
       | get better as a community at making sure that people understand
       | that prompt injection is a factor that needs to be considered for
       | every single LLM-based project.
        
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       (page generated 2023-04-25 23:02 UTC)