[HN Gopher] Show HN: Boring Report, a news app that uses AI to d...
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: Boring Report, a news app that uses AI to desensationalize
the news
In today's world, catchy headlines and articles often distract
readers from the facts and relevant information. By utilizing
OpenAI's language models, Boring Report processes sensationalist
news articles, transforms them into the content you see, and helps
readers focus on the essential details. We recently updated our iOS
app experience, so any and all feedback would be appreciated. App
Link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/boring-report-news-by-
ai/id644...
Author : aquaVitae
Score : 467 points
Date : 2023-05-11 17:32 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.boringreport.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.boringreport.org)
| ryanblakeley wrote:
| From the Science section, there is a headline "Metallic Object
| Falls Through New Jersey Home's Roof", which is the
| desensationalized version of "Possible meteorite crashes through
| the roof of a New Jersey home, lands in bedroom still warm".
|
| The ambiguity of "metal object" kind of makes it more sensational
| than "possible meteorite".
| uoaei wrote:
| Orwell's Newspeak comes to mind. This can be a good app but it
| can also serve to stifle conversation by narrowing the Overton
| window if this kind of technique becomes the norm.
|
| Stay vigilant.
| hgsgm wrote:
| Hey after I click "Desktop Android" when I am on Android, please
| don't show a full screen ad for an iOS app
| ademup wrote:
| I really like the concept and experience even though I almost
| missed out! I thought it was _only_ available as an app when I
| loaded the page on my phone. I rarely (basically never) install
| apps so I closed it immediately. It wasn't until I read on HN
| that I realized there's a web version.
| TheCaptain4815 wrote:
| I'm actually working on something similar but more so to "shame"
| journalists. Most of us have a sense that modern day journalists
| are extremely anti-white and anti-asian and thanks to A.I. we can
| find out who exactly is the most racist journalist, what race
| those journalists are, find specific sections of their articles
| that are racist, etc.
|
| You could even have rankings on which publication/journalists are
| the most racist, the most anti-white, etc. All of which is pretty
| damn easy these days with LLMs and my early tests have come out
| fantastic.
|
| The following step would probably include "editing" the articles
| to make them less racist, less hypocritical, etc.
| haldujai wrote:
| A black-box LLM which is probably inherently biased from its
| training data ascribing racist labels to individual humans and
| ranking them sounds like a horrendous idea you'd read about in
| an Orwell novel.
|
| Do you have any evidence suggesting modern day journalists are
| extremely anti-white and anti-Asian? That's an incredibly bold
| statement to make.
| TheCaptain4815 wrote:
| This will be a combination of numerous fine-tuned models, def
| not using a default LLM.
|
| A bold statement but one I believe is correct. Even Elon
| Musk, the richest man on the planet, believes this. Guess
| we'll see, my main priority is ensuring it's accurate and as
| unbiased as possible. It must work on every news site, both
| left and right wing.
| haldujai wrote:
| I don't think it's a given that finetuning address
| pretraining bias, most LLMs you would have access to are
| trained on very similar and biased corpora, see any
| Anthropic or OpenAI alignment paper.
|
| It's conceptually possible for extensive finetuning + MoE
| to work accurately enough for this premise to be feasible
| but it seems incredibly unlikely with what's available
| today.
|
| In any case, using a non-explainable AI model to call
| individuals racist based on their professional work product
| (which has significant real-world consequences) is still a
| horrible idea. This doesn't carry the same impact as
| mislabeling tweet sentiment.
|
| So we've gone from most of us to Elon Musk and yourself?
| Musk (whose wealth is irrelevant but is second as an FYI)
| is one of the worst appeals to authority you could be
| making on this argument.
| loeg wrote:
| > Most of us have a sense that modern day journalists are
| extremely anti-white and anti-asian
|
| Most of who?
| freediver wrote:
| I've played with a variation of this called "Unbiased News".
|
| The prompt asks to rewrite the article in an unbiased way and to
| also expose biases in the article. It feels 'good' to use.
|
| Demo here:
| https://twitter.com/vladquant/status/1647042056139968512
|
| Code and prompt here:
| https://github.com/OrionBrowser/ProgrammableButtons
| hgsgm wrote:
| "Unbias" doesn't exist.
| ada1981 wrote:
| Here is a slightly more boring version of your description
| according to ChatGPT4:
|
| Today, many news articles contain eye-catching titles and content
| that can lead readers away from the central facts. Boring Report
| uses OpenAI's language models to take these types of articles and
| changes them into the content you are reading now, with the goal
| of aiding readers in paying attention to the primary information.
| mxmbrb wrote:
| Add some localization to include country specific news and theme
| filters and I'd pay for this without hesitation. Free me from
| this cacophony of ever repeating "content" news.
| aquaVitae wrote:
| Localization and further customization is on our list of
| priorities, so say tuned. Thank you for your interest!
| oatmeal1 wrote:
| I feel like the kind of person who would use Boring Report is
| also the kind of person who's brain is already discounting
| sensationalist titles and doesn't really need an app to do it for
| them. That being said, I'm all for trying things to make the news
| more measured and nuanced.
| nsilvestri wrote:
| I disagree, as I think this would be useful to people with
| anxiety disorders who don't want to entirely disconnect from
| the news. Just because they may be able to logically identify
| articles and headlines as "sensationalist" doesn't mean their
| brain won't still kick off some uncomfortable physiological
| responses.
| sha16 wrote:
| Nice work on the app! Reminds me of a news aggregator I worked on
| (inshapemind). What's your tech stack like?
| gnicholas wrote:
| Love the idea, the name, and the app logo. I tried it with a CNN
| article and found that the output was a bit too summarized. It
| would be nice if users could specify if they want no
| summarization (just desensationalize) or if they want
| summarization included (and possibly to what degree).
| asoneth wrote:
| The headline style reminds me of Matt Winkler's "Bloomberg Way"
| which specified headlines that summarized the article into a
| single line, see: https://wildtech.mongabay.com/wp-
| content/uploads/sites/20/20... or https://www.optionsbro.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2017/12/Bloomb...
|
| I'm not sure if they always achieved that, but it was at least a
| goal for readers to be able to skim feeds to understand what was
| going as quickly as possible. Such a policy was feasible because
| the readers were paying customers as opposed to web news which
| are often funded by advertisers or worse.
| shireboy wrote:
| Ah, I've had this idea for 5+ years now and just haven't had time
| to try to build a MVP. Before this year it would have been harder
| to do well - involve human writers and sentiment analysis. But
| lately I have been thinking about trying to do it with GPT.
|
| I genuinely think there is a huge underserved market for a
| "world's most boring news and weather site". Almost everybody I
| talk to on all sides of the aisle recognizes that clickbait news
| is one root cause of lots of problems and want an alternative. In
| fact, in some ways, Hacker News is that site for me.
|
| That said, I don't get why an app not a mobile-responsive
| website.
| georgeg23 wrote:
| It does have a mobile web version:
|
| https://www.boringreport.org/app
| rs999gti wrote:
| There's already - https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news
|
| It's shows left, center, and right bias of new articles.
|
| Read the 'From the center' version of articles, and the bias and
| sensationalism has been removed -
| https://www.allsides.com/story/media-industry-cnn-staffers-c...
| andrewxdiamond wrote:
| Isn't coming to a news story from these specific political
| viewpoints already a whole lot of bias?
|
| I don't think we can boil down most things into three separate
| POV. Not everything needs to be looked at through a political
| party's perspective
| vippy wrote:
| Came to say this. The point seems not to be give an "all
| sides showing" but specifically to remove language that's
| designed to trigger our subcortical response systems.
| haldujai wrote:
| Is that even possible? Take the specific language apart the
| choice of which stories to report on is already/can be
| highly biased.
|
| Not sure a sanitized Fox News or NYT is "bias free" and is
| probably more dangerous than approaching the original
| articles knowing what their bias is.
|
| With that said the product being demo-ed here is about
| sensationalism not bias per se as in this discussion.
| haldujai wrote:
| They actually use a 5-dimension political spectrum. Left-
| right is not specific to any political party, dates back 200+
| years and is extensively used in academic and nonacademic
| literature.
|
| What other system would you recommend for evaluating
| political bias in news?
| lumb63 wrote:
| This is a great concept! Thanks for sharing. I do have to wonder,
| though, if this is a Band-Aid over the problem of sensationalist
| reporting. Assuming there is a market for "boring" news (I think
| there is; I'd like to read it!), wouldn't it be cheaper to pay
| journalists to write less exaggerative pieces in the first place?
| notduncansmith wrote:
| I think counteracting the market forces that drive exaggerated
| journalism would be far more expensive and difficult than
| simply developing some software to filter the exaggerations
| locally. Also, we can work on the first more effectively with
| the second in hand.
| woile wrote:
| In an ideal world yes, but the incentives are not there. For
| example, many governments benefit from media being
| sensationalist, within and outside borders. They don't want
| less sensationalism. I think this "attention to negativity" is
| something inherent to humans, and now that we have opened the
| door, I doubt it's gonna close by everyone paying more to
| journalists.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| I would posit the minority of people are drawn to more
| "boringly" presented news, and as such, it wouldn't make much
| sense to have it be the primary artifact. (for better or worse)
| mkoubaa wrote:
| If there is a x million dollar market for boring news, there's
| an x+a million dollar market for the same news that's less
| boring
| solarkraft wrote:
| There are boring news orgs, but how many are you subscribed to?
| How likely are others to find them?
| carabiner wrote:
| Try ft.com. Most of their revenue comes from subscriptions, not
| ads, so they are not striving to generate clickbait like most
| papers.
| sigstoat wrote:
| personally i'm not interested in seeing the news rewritten by gpt
| as it stands. but if you could automatically find the least
| sensational article on the subject, and then send me to that
| site, along with a plugin that just highlights the most salient
| points, and fades the worst parts to grey, that'd be interesting.
|
| i'd also like to see a service which shows me the news about
| subjects which have managed to stay in the news for at least a
| week. just drop all the 24-48 hour rage/hype cycles.
| thyselius wrote:
| Would be nice to be able to see a summary of the original article
| below the ai one, including the sensationalism
| hinkley wrote:
| I'd settle for an app that merely identifies all of the
| overwrought elements in a story and color codes them, so that we
| can teach people that these sources are a negative influence on
| their lives.
|
| Don't rephrase it, just show me all of the sentence fragments
| that need to be rephrased. Or better still, make it a 'lint' tool
| that rates articles and websites by the density of manipulative
| verbiage they use.
|
| These sites will piss you off and teach you nothing in the
| process.
|
| These sites will piss you off but actually teach you something.
|
| These sites will placate you (I'm looking at you, Ted Talks).
| dubcanada wrote:
| What exactly does "desensationalize the news" mean? Is there any
| additional detail on what exactly it does?
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| What exactly does "What exactly does "desensationalize the
| news" mean?" mean?
|
| I think what you're really saying is: "I'm less interested in
| the work this person did to make something cool; selfishly, I'd
| like to know if it follows my biases so I can judge it based on
| politics."
|
| Or you're just curious how it works and haven't spent the
| effort trying it out, which is valid.
| lastofthemojito wrote:
| It'd be interesting to see a variant of this app with a
| slider bar, allowing one to drag a widget to see the exact
| same stories but with say, far-left, left, center, right or
| far-right biases applied.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| This is unnecessarily presumptive and negative. They have a
| simple question - and that doesn't mean they didn't try it
| out to see how it works from the user side of things.
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| The way the question was asked was not asked as if by a
| person who was simply curious, so yes I was negative.
| dubcanada wrote:
| What a weirdly aggressive attack... Either I'm selfish and
| have a lot of biases or I'm lazy.
|
| Could it not be that as a person with an interest in AI and
| general technology I am wondering if there is any detail on
| what does an "AI" look for to determine a "sensationalist"
| title and how does it "desensationalize" it?
|
| I have scanned the twitter feed and the app and just
| wondering if there is anything on how it works. The answer
| can be no.
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| I'm not trying to attack you, I was dissecting your
| intentions, which I'm now noticing came off as super rude
| and I apologize for that.
|
| But let's be frank... It's clear through your verbiage that
| you were either thinking about this politically or were
| actually just curious as I stated in my previous message.
|
| I never said you were lazy, there are many reasons why you
| might not be able to try out the product right now and it's
| totally normal to ask questions when you assume others
| might have answers. It's also possible to do selfish
| things, or think selfishly at times and not be a selfish
| person, I was not trying to antagonize.
|
| Sorry for misunderstanding your intentions, for some reason
| when you asked "What does desensationalize exactly mean?" I
| read it particularly negatively.
| sureglymop wrote:
| I read the OPs comment seemingly in a completely
| different way than you.
|
| To me, it's just a comment asking how it may work
| (technically). Pretty normal to ask that on HN. The
| persons feelings or intentions aren't reflected in the
| comment and I think aren't relevant to the question
| either way.
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| I think it's the word "Exactly" in his sentence that
| changes the meaning away from "I'm intellectually
| curious" for me. I'm just reading between the lines but
| the op can change their intention as they please and deny
| so whatever I say at this point is irrelevant and it's
| likely I was being too cheeky.
|
| Wouldn't someone who was intellectually curious just ask:
| "That's interesting, I wonder how it works?" and not:
| "What does desensationalized exactly mean?" which is
| overly negative. Incidentally, I'm being accused of being
| negative for pointing that out.
| dubcanada wrote:
| May I polity just say that perhaps defending yourself to
| this many people is unneeded. You said your two cents,
| hammering the same nail with a different hammer won't get
| the nail in any deeper. I've already completely moved on,
| you should as well. We are in HN, not reddit, let's all
| get a long as best as we can and discuss the matters at
| hand. I have no problems with you, I hope you have
| nothing against me.
|
| My intentions were not negative, if it was interpreted
| that way I apologize, same as you I type the way I type.
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| So you can be rude, but I can't be a little cheeky, roger
| that. I have no problems with you and I hope you have a
| great day!
| phs wrote:
| Please allow me to pay you so you can focus on this full-time.
| CSSer wrote:
| What I find most ironic about this is that rather than bringing
| users closer to the source of information it potentially pushes
| them farther away by adding an additional step to verification. I
| imagine you've considered this? How easy does your app make it to
| access the source article and author information, for example?
| beardyw wrote:
| Looks like the original URL is at the top of every story.
| aquaVitae wrote:
| We readily make available the source article on both iOS app
| and website. We want to serve as the stepping stone for
| information about an event that would encourage people to seek
| out more.
| kmod wrote:
| I built something that summarizes hacker news discussion pages
| for me, and I have been very pleasantly surprised how much nicer
| it is to read "angryuser1 and angryuser2 got into a heated
| discussion" than to actually read the discussion. Forcing
| everything into the neutral gpt voice has greatly reduced the
| emotional valence of my HN consumption
| akomtu wrote:
| Modern "news" is a lot like sewage padded by corn fructose syrup
| and wrapped into shiny colorful pills to fool the mind. It's true
| that the pills have useful elements in trace amounts, but if you
| start harvesting them from the pills, you'll get poisoned. Your
| LM just removes the deceptive shell, but the pill's contents
| remain the same. I think it would be better if your LM identified
| and highlighted lies and deceptions in news articles. Most of
| them will be all in red, but that's the goal: give users an idea
| what they are reading. For example, the prompt for your LM could
| be: "for every statement in this arricle, mark it in red if it's
| a lie or an unsubstantiated claim, mark it in purple if it's
| appeal to emotions, mark it in green if it's appeal to authority"
| and so on. I doubt journalusts will be able to outmaneuver LLM
| trained on every book in the internet. (journalusts to
| distinguish from true journalists, that are exceedingly rare
| today)
| DesiLurker wrote:
| though thats true this product (if widely used) would reduce
| incentives to make clickbaity headlines like 'You Wont Believe'
| or 'Watch what happens when'. Also 5000 word essay at the start
| of every boiled potato recipe. Thats a step forward but to
| change the actual content of news would require adjustment of
| journalistic motivations, which are primarily either money or
| power driven. they dont change easy especially given how much
| money is in keeping populus close to 50/50 on only 2 options.
| tikkun wrote:
| I'm generally excited about something I'm calling "English to
| English translation" - and this is a good example.
|
| Previously translation has focused on going between languages.
|
| I think there's just as much benefit to translating within a
| given language.
|
| * Translate corporate speak to plain English.
|
| * Translate passive aggressive to calm and peaceful.
|
| * Translate sensationalist to neutral (like the OP).
|
| * Translate implicit and heavy with subtext to direct and
| assertive.
| nico wrote:
| The same concept applies to so many things
|
| One time, local-dialect subtitles completely changed a movie
| experience for me
|
| It was an American movie. Where I was, they usually watch
| movies with english audio and neutral Spanish subtitles
|
| This time, instead of neutral Spanish, they used local Spanish
| with slang... wow, what a difference in the way the movie felt
|
| Having local language and slang can convey meaning and emotions
| so much more effectively
| nottorp wrote:
| Proper translation is an art form... if you have the budget.
|
| Otherwise, it's someone typing as fast as the movie goes on
| the first viewing.
| torresmo wrote:
| I am looking forward to a tool to summarize a 10 page long
| Terms of Service into a list of points about what I really need
| to beware of. Same for legal contracts.
| cookie_monsta wrote:
| Still generated by humans afaik, but in the neighbourhood:
|
| https://tosdr.org/
| jebarker wrote:
| Another use case in the arts: interpreting literature and
| finding connections within and between books
| tikkun wrote:
| See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35256007
| throwaway280382 wrote:
| TI have been thinking on similar lines. I have access to my
| own freelancers. However, do you have any pointers to
| algos/libraries I should be using? My NLP skills are not
| great!
| dontupvoteme wrote:
| you are missing "rewrite email i don't want to read in the
| style of <author i like> influenced by <other thing i like>"
| gerash wrote:
| What a great idea!
|
| The next step is to give each outlet a sensationalism score and
| then normalize their headlines according to how they usually
| sensationalize.
| carabiner wrote:
| You could just read the Financial Times.
| ShadowBanThis01 wrote:
| This should be useful for the ever-more-hyperbolic weather
| reports that dominate network news now.
|
| NBC News, almost every week: "20 million Americans threatened by
| severe weather this weekend!"
|
| "Bomb cyclone threatens 10 million people"
|
| "Atmospheric river menacing 18 million people"
|
| Translation: A rainy front is moving through several states.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I mean there is a different between 'getting some rain this
| weekend' and 'life threatening flooding'.
|
| The atmospheric river post would be an example of the second
| headline and should still maintain the necessary urgency and
| implied danger.
| ShadowBanThis01 wrote:
| There is indeed a difference, but you wouldn't know it from
| listening to these breathless announcements every night.
|
| What I hate about these particular (nearly verbatim) examples
| is the summing of the entire population of every state that
| might be touched by a system and barfing it out as if it's a
| body count.
|
| And why all of a sudden does every weather phenomenon (or
| variant thereof) have a new sensational name?
|
| And on a California-centric tangent: I also detest
| meaningless labels, which CA loves. For example, there's a
| RED FLAG WARNING! WTF is that supposed to mean? Are millions
| of people threatened by red flags? OH NOES!
|
| And finally there's "sigalert." Insert giant eye-roll emoji.
| gregman1 wrote:
| Could you please add news.ycombinator.com to the feed?
| mgcross wrote:
| This is great, but I didn't realize that was a video at the top
| of the page; I think it needs the 'muted' attribute for it to
| autoplay.
| vaskal08 wrote:
| Hey, dev on this project, thanks for the heads up! Fix should
| be there soon.
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| Another great option is legiblenews which provides headlines from
| Wikipedia edits and is a bit dry but informative. I remember when
| Trump was president he was mentioned on legiblenews[1] a handful
| of times during his term while the mainstream media gyrated with
| his every move. It made me realize how little of the day to day
| news cycle has meaningful impact on the long term history of the
| world.
|
| [1] https://legiblenews.com/
| xtracto wrote:
| Thanks for doing this. This is something I've been looking for
| since ChatGPT was unveiled generally. I wish Feedly or a similar
| RSS/News-aggregator would add a feature like this ... it would
| make so much sense.
| aquaVitae wrote:
| We plan to implement RSS support as well, so please stay tuned.
| Thanks for the support.
| gumballindie wrote:
| Ha! Was just scrolling about to see if anyone asked about
| rss. I think you are onto something, I know i will keep your
| app installed for a while. Good luck and well done!
| LightBug1 wrote:
| What? You mean make news headlines useful?
|
| * rapturous applause * if this works.
| badnewsforu wrote:
| [flagged]
| powersnail wrote:
| I've also been thinking about processing news with LMs, but from
| a different angle.
|
| One big complaint I have for reading news through RSS, is that
| there's no natural hierarchy/priority to the news. There's no
| front page, no headline, no size in RSS feeds. Given the way news
| agencies generates those feeds, there are _tons_ of repetition,
| tiny updates, some insignificant one-liner interview about some
| significant events. Not to mention the "no update at this point"
| updates. Entries that are not informative look exactly the same
| as---but often outnumbers---the entries that are informative.
|
| An ideal news feed processor to me, would be one that reads
| through last weeks RSS feeds, and merges the all those tiny
| updates into coherent articles, ranked by the significance of the
| event. Sort of turning newspaper into a journal.
|
| The merging and reflow should be well-within an LM's capability.
| However, I'm not sure if OpenAI's API can swallow an entire
| week's worth of RSS, or produce multiple full-sized articles, but
| this is something that I'd like to try when I get some free
| weekends.
| TySchultz wrote:
| I had nearly the same idea as you around surfacing what is
| "important" vs just a large list of RSS articles.
|
| The main differences compared to what you are thinking are two
| things. One for the `Significance of the event` I've used the
| number of publishers talking about that event. So more
| publishers == more important. Two, I've done this in a daily
| fashion instead of a weekly report.
|
| I can also confirm that the LM has the capability to do at
| least a days worth (2500+) of articles. I would doubt its
| capability to produce an entire article but it does a great job
| at a small summary.
|
| Here is the link if you wanted to check it out.
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/quill-news-digest/id1669557131
| haldujai wrote:
| Are you curating the list of publishers somehow? I would
| imagine the AP/AFP newswire repost circuit/echo chamber would
| result in overestimating importance of a lot of crapola and
| underestimate the importance of investigative pieces for
| example.
| TySchultz wrote:
| This was an issue when I first started. With minimal
| sources a lot of time the top collections were low quality
| SEO articles.
|
| After adding a sufficient amount of sources I've noticed a
| decent reduction in the echo chamber. Although by ranking
| importance by the most talked about topic, it is going to
| have some sort of echo chamber.
|
| Adding left and right leaning publishers for instance has
| helped. Although one might say something is good and
| something is bad, the embeddings pick it up as the same
| topic.
|
| In a way it also cuts through bias.
| haldujai wrote:
| I just downloaded it, looks pretty useful especially for
| news sections I don't follow particularly closely.
|
| Will check this out over a few days.
|
| Out of curiosity have you looked at deep you can go while
| still getting quality results (i.e. beyond top 2-3 in
| each heading)?
| parpfish wrote:
| A related idea that I've had is to present a time-lagged
| newsfeed and use AI to link to any follow up stories.
|
| "hey, remember how everyone was panicking about the price of
| eggs a few months ago? Well, prices are normal now but only one
| person wrote about it so you probably didn't hear that"
| circuit10 wrote:
| People get the impression that mostly bad things are
| happening because "this just got much worse" is newsworthy
| but "this isn't as bad as it was 5 years ago" isn't, and
| improvements tend to happen slowly whereas disasters can
| happen quickly
| Fatboyrunning wrote:
| Well done.
|
| There is something like this in 'A Fire Upon the Deep' by Vernor
| Vinge; his intergalactic societies translate their alien
| languages - and incompatible methods of expression - using an
| application similar to this one.
|
| Very cool whenever sci-fi becomes reality!
| chankstein38 wrote:
| I think this is an amazing idea! The only flaw I see with it is
| that without the sensationalized headlines I read through going
| "Oh that doesn't matter, that doesn't matter either" etc haha I
| haven't found an article that sounds interesting in a few
| scrolls.
|
| I mean, it's great because it's accurate. Half of the "news"
| we're fed is sensationalized so we'll click on it and it's really
| nothing but it gets us riled up about something that is
| effectively meaningless to us. This just brings reality to the
| forefront and makes me realize I don't care about the news lol
|
| Thank you though, this is awesome!
| Clubber wrote:
| Yes, this has a lot of potential. If the news orgs won't de-
| sensationalize because of incentives, we can do it for them. It
| would be a great browser plugin, and you can define the URL's
| you want to de-sensationalize.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| I love that idea!
| shrimpx wrote:
| Maybe it could also use the LLM to rank the articles by
| essential importance or impact.
| harryvederci wrote:
| > This just brings reality to the forefront and makes me
| realize I don't care about the news
|
| Maybe the pre-clickbait era version of you would have found
| more of these articles interesting? So maybe it's not that you
| don't care about the news, but your "base level" of what's
| interesting is different due to being used to clickbait.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| 100% agree, doing this wholesale would probably help my (and
| likely others) mental states as a whole! Imagine
| desensationalizing product sites and ads and the like, we
| might actually be able to bring down that threshold so it can
| stop ever increasing. The irony here is I feel like what I
| wrote here is sensationalized lol I do truly think it could
| be helpful I just think a lot of us are "broken" as far as
| that's concerned from the exhausting nature of everything
| these days always vying for our attention.
| lizardking wrote:
| I'm not sure that's a flaw
| searchableguy wrote:
| > The only flaw I see with it is that without the
| sensationalized headlines I read through going "Oh that doesn't
| matter, that doesn't matter either" etc haha I haven't found an
| article that sounds interesting in a few scrolls.
|
| I tried doing the same thing as OP with chatgpt and came to the
| same realization so I stopped.
| gnicholas wrote:
| I think the issue here is that we've been fed a high-
| sensationalism diet, so our brains are acclimated to in-your-
| face headlines. Perhaps if we detoxed our brains a bit (by
| using this app exclusively for a week or two), we would be able
| to recalibrate our expectations for what seems "interesting".
|
| This is sort of like how you recalibrate your tongue to a low-
| salt diet if you stop eating salty food for a few weeks.
| TheBlight wrote:
| The problem with the news isn't that it's sensationalized,
| which of course it is, but that an ever increasing amount of
| it is completely made up.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Hm, maybe from some news outlets. I think the main issue
| for big news outlets isn't outright falsehoods, it's the
| coverage bias. You really can't get a full sense of what's
| going on if you don't make an effort to get news from
| divergent sources because each outlet covers the news that
| fits its preferred narrative.
| jquery wrote:
| Ah, the sweet aroma of coverage bias, isn't it just the
| spice of the journalistic world? The quest to avoid
| blatant falsehoods is relatively straightforward, much
| like a game of whack-a-mole. Identify the blabbermouths,
| the rumor-mongers, the peddlers of deceit, and voila!
| You've successfully exiled them from your daily news
| diet. A glorious accomplishment, indeed!
|
| However, when it comes to bias, things get
| somewhat...messy. It's like trying to play chess on a
| board that keeps shifting under your fingers. An
| insidious infiltrator, bias sneakily weaves itself into
| the fabric of reporting, subtly influencing what gets
| attention and what doesn't. We're all detectives in this
| narrative, sifting through data, trying to separate the
| wheat from the chaff.
|
| News, like science, isn't a perfect process. What's
| chosen for investigation often matters as much as the
| ensuing results. News sources, then, become our guides in
| this complex labyrinth, and their credibility can make or
| break our understanding of the world. The elusive
| "objective narrative" might be a mirage, but some news
| oases are certainly closer to the wellspring of reality
| than others.
|
| Now, consider the ill-advised adventurer who thinks
| they're diversifying their media intake by adding a dash
| of conspiracy theory and a sprinkle of sensationalism.
| Suddenly, they're questioning whether 5G is responsible
| for a global pandemic. A fascinating thought, no doubt,
| but one that's more suited for a science fiction novel,
| perhaps?
|
| Practicality is key. If you're a trans individual or a
| parent of a trans child in Florida, news headlines like
| "Florida's Draconian Measures Against Trans Kids" are
| crucial for your well-being. If, however, you're more
| interested in the intricate dance of global finances, a
| business-centric outlet would be your go-to.
|
| Media mammoths like The Washington Post and The New York
| Times attempt to cater to this myriad of needs, breaking
| down their content into neatly packaged sections like
| sports, economy, politics, culture, and so on. Yet, their
| own peculiar biases can sometimes stain the narrative
| (ahem, New York Times and your unfortunate penchant for
| trans panic stories).
|
| In short, my dear friend, finding balance in news
| consumption is less like a serene ballet and more like a
| lively tango. You're constantly adjusting, recalibrating,
| and challenging your understanding of the world. Bias
| will always be there, lingering in the shadows. The trick
| is not to eliminate it, but to dance with it.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| Amen to that
|
| If we got a full-scale media blitz with pictures every
| time someone died in a car crash, people would take
| unnecessary car-related deaths much more seriously. 100
| people a day are dying in the USA right now
|
| There's so much fucked up stuff like that going on in the
| world, and people have no idea about it since it never
| hits the news
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| What are "divergent sources" anyway?
|
| On anything that matters, all sources just copy AP or
| each other, and maybe splice in some random tweets. Once
| you're looking at a topic where the news source is
| providing some kind of opinion, it's a clear sign you're
| dealing with some thoroughly irrelevant bullshit non-
| issue, and closing the tab is the best thing you could do
| now.
| gnicholas wrote:
| I'm referring to sources whose target audiences differ
| greatly. For example, if you read NYT and NPR, those are
| not divergent sources. NPR and Fox News, or Reason and
| either NPR or Fox News are divergent. I don't personally
| read Fox News myself, but use them as an example here
| because they are well known for their coverage bias.
|
| For more recommendations, check out the Read Across the
| Aisle app, [1] which I created to help battle groupthink
| and the resulting misunderstandings and incivility.
|
| 1: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/read-across-the-
| aisle/id118985...
| upsidesinclude wrote:
| The _very first_ article is a left leaning fact check.
|
| This needs work to be what you claim. You've baked in bias and
| report it without emotion
| int_19h wrote:
| What is the problem with the summarization of that article,
| exactly?
|
| https://www.boringreport.org/app/all/645c525a001a7a3765dbc4c...
|
| Or are you complaining that it's there at all?
| Proven wrote:
| [dead]
| mrandish wrote:
| It's somewhat sad this tool is so desperately needed to make
| modern 'news' media less annoying and more useful. Frankly, over
| the past year I've intentionally blocked almost all news media
| out of my life by aggressively curating all my content. It was
| weird at first but over time I've found I'm less distracted and
| happier. I get more done and I'm now able to better focus on the
| people and things that actually matter to me.
|
| It's ironic that this tool is essentially reverting news
| reporting back to what journalism is supposed to be - factually
| reporting notable events that have already happened. It's bizarre
| how acceptable it now is for 'news' to include 'opinion and
| speculation'.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| I love the idea! I was thinking about doing sth similar to my
| medieval content farm (https://tidings.potato.horse/about) but as
| a personalised feed, where I can apply different "soft" filters
| to different types of content, eg. remove garbage tech-bro
| language, provide outlines/shorter versions of sensationalised
| content, reference related articles from different sources.
| Essentially, I was thinking about replacing my poet/editorial
| team personas with different user personas.
| eternalban wrote:
| I have a feeling this is somehow going to end up becoming a
| hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| I wrote a small utility to send the AP news feed to GPT and ask
| it to judge which stories are important based on how many people
| they affect and how time-sensitive they are. ie. Will this story
| still be important tomorrow?
|
| Only the passing ones are then delivered to me.
|
| I'm not releasing this as a product, it's too simple, but it
| works surprisingly well, and it's trivial to add criteria for
| what you deem to be important, or not.
| chaoz_ wrote:
| Will definitely use that for my next dopamine detox cycle.
| int_19h wrote:
| This is surprisingly good already for an early product. I'd be
| willing to pay a subscription fee for something like this.
|
| Have you considered extending it further so that instead of
| tackling news articles individually, it would try to find and
| aggregate / juxtapose everything prominent that is published
| about some particular news item in a similar "boring" manner?
| kjreact wrote:
| This is the type of news app that I've always wanted. Kudos. I
| hate the sensationalism in news these days. One thing I'd like to
| see is a feature for grouping articles about the same piece of
| news. I keep seeing repeating articles covered by different
| outlets. It may not be easy to implement, but it'd make it much
| more useful for skimming the daily news.
| ConfusedDog wrote:
| I need an alternative YouTube homepage that generate video
| suggestions without clickbait titles and thumbnails.
| crazygringo wrote:
| For thumbnails, ask and ye shall receive -- Clickbait Remover
| for Youtube:
|
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clickbait-remover-...
|
| Further discussion on HN:
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+...
| SomewhatLikely wrote:
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-videos-sum...
| jeremyjh wrote:
| But how will you know what to click on without a goofy face
| with a shocked expression?
| dontupvoteme wrote:
| is anything of value lost by suppressing youtube videos with
| thumbnails containing faces showing happiness > 0.9? i
| suspect not.
|
| this probably functions decently well as a "europe vs
| america" discriminator.
| sureglymop wrote:
| I use Procrastination Free YouTube. It has settings to
| customize YouTube so that you don't see any suggestions at all.
| If i need to watch a video, I have to search for it. In order
| to not miss Videos from people i want to follow, I use NewPipe
| on my phone.
| kritr wrote:
| I actually liked this a lot more than I thought I would. I would
| say I'm pretty averse to clicking on sensational titles, but that
| definitely leads me to not click on articles that may have
| contained useful information. This actually makes me comfortable
| reading about politics and issues that are otherwise
| overdramaticized and gives me the opportunity to objectively
| filter what I want to read.
| tethys wrote:
| Can't say I'm a regular user of Artifact, but I've played around
| for a bit with their AI summarize feature and found it really
| satisfying. Very reliably tells you what's hiding behind
| clickbaity headlines and best of all, it works without having to
| confirm/close cookie dialogs or any other popovers first.
|
| Edit: To give an example: Coming across the headline "Popular
| action series is cancelled after just one season", the summary
| really provides everything I want to know (or at least: to let me
| decide if I want to spend time actually reading the article):
|
| > Cancelled after one season: CBS has axed action series True
| Lies, based on the 1994 film, after struggling to find its own
| identity.
|
| > Mixed reviews and lack of audience: The show failed to gain a
| large enough audience despite starring actors like Steve Howey
| and Beverly D'Angelo.
| perrygeo wrote:
| You've thrown out many subjective terms here: "catchy",
| "relevant", "sensationalist", "essential". How do you intend to
| define these and hold yourself accountable? How are you planning
| to keep your biases or the emergent biases of the underlying tech
| in check?
|
| "just hand it to OpenAI and :shrug:" is not a responsible answer.
| remote_phone wrote:
| Do they pay for a news feed to get the original articles to
| desensationalize? I'm curious about any copyright or licensing
| issues around using external news articles as source material for
| desensationalizing.
| vrglvrglvrgl wrote:
| [dead]
| JALTU wrote:
| There's also: https://www.newsminimalist.com/
| RobinL wrote:
| I would love to see a combination of the two: stories ranked by
| importance with boring headlines
| chrisbolt wrote:
| It already is rewriting the headline and summary:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35797241
|
| Full thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35795388
| morsch wrote:
| _JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon testified before a Senate
| Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs hearing on September 22,
| 2022. Dimon mentioned that as the U.S. nears a potential default
| on its sovereign debt, markets could experience panic. ..._ [1]
|
| He said that today, but in an interview with Bloomberg. The
| source article[2] just illustrates it with an archive photo from
| 2022, when he testified in a Senate hearing. Similarly, the
| Disney article[3] starts non-sensically _The Disney+ logo was
| displayed on a TV screen in Paris on December 26, 2019. Disney
| shares decreased by 9%[...]_ (I don 't think displaying the logo
| 4 years ago is to blame).
|
| I suppose you should just stop parsing image subtitles. The two
| articles I checked were otherwise accurate.
|
| [1]
| https://www.boringreport.org/app/all/645cfc85bab323b21e6195e... I
| had to use the developer tools to copy paste the text, obnoxious.
| You also can't right- or middle-click the source link (to copy it
| or open it in a background tab). Don't hijack basic browser
| functionality.
|
| [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/11/jpms-jamie-dimon-warns-of-
| ma...
|
| [3]
| https://www.boringreport.org/app/all/645d0cebbaef7c040f89ca4...
| madeofpalk wrote:
| I've come around to there being legitimate usecases for this
| type of generative AI, but I don't think producing anything
| that's supposed to be "True" or "Correct" is one. I think the
| only useful usecases is for when you want to generate fiction.
| ghotli wrote:
| If you tell GPT-4 specifically to respond with proper jargon
| for the domain like that found in a textbook or journal it
| provides much much more useful replies. Silly that prompt
| engineering is what's required but at least for my purposes
| wherein I fact check it's output it's right nearly all the
| time and I've learned a great deal.
| __loam wrote:
| Even then there's literally nothing stopping it from making
| shit up.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Writing summaries of documents and correspondence is one of
| the major use cases of those models. Desensitionalization and
| debullshittification are very similar to summarization, so it
| stands to reason LLMs should handle these tasks just as well.
| haldujai wrote:
| Summarized bullshit is still bullshit akin to a polished
| turd.
|
| Given that the choice of which articles to write is
| incredibly biased to begin with this approach does not seem
| effective.
|
| What could theoretically work is an "AI news agency" that
| "summarizes" many different sources to generate unbiased
| articles.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Given that the choice of which articles to write is
| incredibly biased to begin with this approach does not
| seem effective._
|
| Selection bias is a given. You always have to keep that
| in mind. But when you actually _want_ to read a specific
| article, summarizers are useful. For news and general
| population content, debullshitifiers could come in handy
| too.
|
| Point being, the texts are not _random_. There 's some
| nugget of valuable content in it, but it's usually
| wrapped by enormous layer of SEO, ad hooks, word count
| padding, and/or general nonsense. Reducing signal-to-
| noise ratio here - stripping all those layers of bullshit
| - is strictly useful.
| haldujai wrote:
| I'm not arguing summarization is not useful, or stripping
| the various sources of noise you listed.
|
| "Debullshitification" reads as de-biasing which is not
| what you just itemized.
|
| My point is rather that Fox News+LLM (as an example) is
| still biased but would appear/may be incorrectly
| presented as unbiased to a reader not acutely aware of
| selection bias which is probably not something an average
| reader is well informed about.
| tourmalinetaco wrote:
| >What could theoretically work is an "AI news agency"
| that "summarizes" many different sources to generate
| unbiased articles.
|
| NewsMinimalist does this, it's quite interesting. I've
| been using it since its introduction, and its been a fun
| way to get lots of summarized, de-sensationalized
| headlines. Specifically I enjoy setting it to 6.0 and
| reading the headlines that have impact that didn't quite
| reach the 6.5+ threshold.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35795388
| vaskal08 wrote:
| Hey, other dev on this project. This is a good catch, and we're
| aware of this issue. What it's doing is actually using a photo
| caption as part of the article, and we're working on removing
| the use of that in the summarization process.
| jjeaff wrote:
| In fairness to the AI, I have often been confused by stock
| images or old images on news articles that are not from the
| event in question.
| mc32 wrote:
| Photo attribution is a bit of a problem. For a tornado in
| Kansas they may use an image from another year's tornado in
| Mississippi. For the war in Azerbaijan they might use an
| image from Chechnya, etc.
| shever73 wrote:
| True, I have a photograph taken in Kenya that has been
| variously described as in California, Guatemala, Colombia,
| Australia and South Africa.
| joshribakoff wrote:
| That is precisely the type of editorial affordance I would
| expect the AI to strip. This is just another way for media
| organizations to distort the news. I look forward to those
| enhancements
| ethbr0 wrote:
| False metadata for rich media is a damned tough problem
| to target.
|
| Putting aside any actually truthful captions, how do I
| know that "image of X" is actually an image of X?
|
| Reading some of the Bellingcat investigations, and time
| spent, doesn't bode well.
|
| I guess you could TinEye and index/hash the entire web's
| worth of rich media, then spot discrepancies (listed as X
| here, but Y there), but that seems horrendous in
| compute/bandwidth/storage terms.
| toss1 wrote:
| >>seems horrendous in compute/bandwidth/storage terms
|
| Yes, but the usefulness of being able to automate that
| identification in near-real-time to debunk the firehose
| of falsehoods we get from everywhere would be
| astronomical
|
| Anyone reading would have a huge edge in both being more
| accurately grounded in reality and being able to identify
| the biggest/hottest disinformation streams
| [deleted]
| AnonCoward42 wrote:
| I don't think it makes a difference in what tone you're being
| lied to.
| int_19h wrote:
| It does. You're much more likely to spot a lie that does not
| try to push your emotional buttons before delivering the
| falsehoods.
| teeray wrote:
| I'm kinda curious how this would make truly sensational news
| completely blase
| gnicholas wrote:
| Do you generate the headline from the original headline, or do
| you desensationalize the body of the article and then ask OpenAI
| to generate a headline based off of the new article body?
|
| It seems like the latter might be better, since it ensures the
| headline actually matches the article below, as opposed to
| relying on a likely-clickbaity title that would no longer match
| the desensationalized article body.
|
| Probably worth testing both ways to see what the results look
| like!
| rkangel wrote:
| Also, in a couple of cases the desensationalising has removed
| (useful) information. E.g. in
| https://www.boringreport.org/app/all/645d396cf7c90670355a6c7...
| the headline is "Supreme Court Decisions in Two Cases" missing
| any of the stuff about corruption in the original headline
| "Supreme Court sides with ex-Cuomo aide and Buffalo developer
| in disputes over corruption convictions".
|
| (also, that click jacking to prevent copy/paste is a PITA)
| tehjoker wrote:
| You can't just reword things and get a better result. If there
| actually is an alien invasion and the earth is actually doomed,
| that's actually the correct headline.
|
| Media literacy is about way more than about the wording of
| headlines. It's also about understanding why a headline was
| selected, who benefits from a story, whether the story is
| internally logically consistent, and why were the people quoted
| selected, context of the story that you wouldn't know just from
| reading it, etc.
|
| I say this as someone that wrote a browser plugin to do something
| similar in like 2011 by screening words that indicated the
| headline was pointless.
| pdabbadabba wrote:
| I agree. Although one side effect of the Boring Report's
| approach that I quite like is that it also seems to make the
| headlines more informative.
| miguelbemartin wrote:
| Love the idea, it would be nice to have this as a chrome
| extension.
| amelius wrote:
| I want this on my Facebook newsfeed.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I'd love to see an ongoing set of graphs and data visualisations
| that show me what's going on.
|
| E.g.
|
| - how much are we borrowing this year and the last 50 years
|
| - what is net migration for the last 50 years
|
| - what is inflation for the last 50 years
|
| - what are the crime rates for the last 50 years
|
| - what are the violent crime rates for the last 50 years
|
| Don't know why I picked 50 every time, but I'd just love some
| key, well-contextualised data that we could all agree on. At the
| moment it seems as though people can't even agree on basic facts,
| and anything that helps with that would be awesome.
| erehweb wrote:
| Agree that this would be interesting, but your proposed
| solution would not address people not agreeing on facts, I
| think. People often (many on this site) say that they don't
| believe government inflation figures, or that underreporting of
| crime makes crime rates meaningless.
| solarkraft wrote:
| I'm sceptical about how good you can make low-quality source
| material. If you've managed to train an AI to find the little
| nuggets of truth that the headline is based on, that's cool. But
| if the topic is relevant, there will be an article from a
| reputable source about it.
|
| With the current advancements, is there finally a browser
| extension that just _hides_ clickbait titles /thumbnails?
| taylorius wrote:
| Now here is an app that ought to be held high as having real, and
| potentially enormous benefit to the world. (Though I wont hold my
| breath for any online media sources to write about it.) :-)
| DesiLurker wrote:
| So basically https://www.reddit.com/r/savedyouaclick
| autogenerated by AI
| gumballindie wrote:
| In an ideal world we'd have a network of trusted people that feed
| trusted event highlights and leave it to ai to fill in the gaps
| or detect bias. At the moment news is just a collection of
| episodes and arcs aimed at maintaining a constant state of fear
| and anger - emotions familiar to all of us. We are designed to
| pay attention to danger and the media knows this. We should
| detoxify it. It's done enough harm.
|
| Edit: after reading some of the content i really like it!
| teawrecks wrote:
| That's like saying, in an ideal world we don't need encryption
| because no one lies, everyone is responsible with the data they
| are entrusted with, and no one has any motives to look at data
| that doesn't belong to them. Ok, but we don't live in that
| world. So we have encryption, and people have to take what they
| hear with a grain of salt.
| [deleted]
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| We should do the same with fiction novels. For example:
|
| In 1922, a man named Nick Carraway moved to West Egg, Long
| Island, a region populated by newly rich individuals who have
| established social connections. Nick has taken residence in a
| small house next door to a mansion owned by a man named Jay
| Gatsby.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| In the old days, I am told, BBC newsreaders read the news, and
| on days when not enough had happened, proceeded to play music
| for the remainder of their timeslot.
| kevincox wrote:
| I think this is the real problem. News is "made" to fit a
| budget. My ideal news would only be published when it is
| actually worth reading.
| gumballindie wrote:
| As it should be. Why constantly bombard us with nonsense?
| Every now and then i chill and listen to old radio
| broadcasts. There were plenty of bad things happening at the
| time but somehow the way they were presented was calming and
| reassuring. Modern news make it sound like civil wars are
| imminent and we are constantly ready to jump at each other's
| throats. A bit like "Give me the photos, I will give you the
| war". If there is no reason to panic they'll manufacture one.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| News now behaves a lot more like gossip than journalism.
| Small things are made sensational, and big things are spun
| to make the best story for the teller and the receiver.
| rswerve wrote:
| I love the idea of a news summary, but this is also something of
| a reductio ad absurdum of "just the facts" reporting. Informative
| reporting would tell me what happened, who is affected, why it
| might matter to me, etc. Having a point of view (or a bias, if
| you like) is unavoidable when providing context, but providing
| context is essential to being informative.
|
| It's a hard problem! But I'd guess that not many people will
| stick with this as their news source, because it won't hold their
| interest, because it doesn't include all that information about
| why they might want to care.
| reso wrote:
| I'd be likely to use this in my daily workflow if it was a chrome
| extension that could simply modify headlines and article text.
| zorak8me wrote:
| Yes! Can you make a plug-in that reads articles and replaces
| headlines with the story lead (aka what the headline would have
| been 30 years ago)?
| 0x445442 wrote:
| What's it do about news worthy content that's not reported?
| shrimpx wrote:
| The prospect that this type of tech could proliferate is
| politicians' and political media's worst nightmare lol. Imagine
| everyone putting a boring filter on CNN, Fox News, and political
| Twitter. Politicians would have to run on policy platforms again,
| which has become almost unthinkable.
| nomel wrote:
| With the "by omissions" dishonesty that most politicized news
| orgs go with these days, I think gathering all news, then
| putting it through the AI, would be ideal. There would be some
| chance at getting the whole picture.
|
| I'm far more interested in what a sensational news org decided
| to _not_ include.
| billythemaker wrote:
| Also check out News Minimalist! https://www.newsminimalist.com
| malcolmgreaves wrote:
| > In today's world, catchy headlines and articles often distract
| readers from the actual facts and relevant information.
|
| A reasonable premise! But easier said than done. I wonder how
| this app counteracts the hallucination and lying behavior of
| LLMs.* Would be pretty bad to trade off easier-to-decipher human
| bias and sensationalism for distorted truths and lies from an
| obfuscated sequence of dot products!
|
| * I assume they are using LLMs because they state:
|
| > By utilizing the power of advanced AI language models capable
| of generating human-like text,
| a13o wrote:
| I think there will be an art to these "information
| summarization" products. You want just enough summarization to
| accomplish the reader's goal, while also minimizing your
| hallucination surface area. Summarize too short, and your user
| won't get what they came for. Summarize too long, and watch
| user trust crater as the hallucinations pile up.
|
| I don't think there's a generalized solution to this problem
| for all information domains, so when search engine companies
| implement it it'll be low quality. What remains to be seen is
| if the money is in being a curator/aggregator within a niche,
| as Boring Report aims to be; or if it will be in selling the
| specialized summarization tech to the content creators directly
| - for use by them when they publish. I think the latter leans
| B2B and will have higher quality since the content creator
| signs off on it. But we'll see. Either way, the right mental
| model for LLMs may be to treat them as memetic compression
| algorithms.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Usually it hallucinates when you're asking for information, in
| this case it's rewriting existing text, so it should be a
| _little_ safer. When in doubt check another source, as with
| everything.
| no_no_no_no wrote:
| [dead]
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Here's an idea, maybe the reason why news is angering and
| emotional is that there is a lot of bad shit going on in the
| world that we have just kind of let happen for a long time, and a
| lot of injustice that shouldn't be ignored, and a lot of people
| justice ignores that it shouldn't.
|
| Maybe the solution isn't to pretend things are just fine. People
| keep trying to paint this as some sort of "sensationalism" and "I
| want just the facts" but the facts are that thousands of people
| die every day from cheaply and easily preventable illnesses and
| issues while people who can literally self fund rocketry get to
| accumulate even more wealth and power.
|
| There's a difference between "remember the maine" and "hey women
| right now are literally dying because they can't get abortions to
| remove dead tissue inside their body because of some completely
| different person believes their religion says doing so is a
| crime"
|
| Being angry from news like this isn't a bad thing. You SHOULD be
| angry.
| thenoblesunfish wrote:
| That sounds nice, but the problem is that 99.99% of people get
| angry and then .. do little. At best they complain to their
| friends and raise awareness. Mostly they just feel stressed.
| The point is that the bottleneck is not awareness or even
| justifiable rage, it's intelligent action, and a more staid
| view of current events sounds attractive.
| krapp wrote:
| >Being angry from news like this isn't a bad thing. You SHOULD
| be angry.
|
| Why?
|
| What are you going to _do?_
|
| Just get high off the dopamine drip fed by social media rage
| cycles? Angry rants on Twitter? Maybe start a Youtube channel
| and make a buck or two with banal political essays?
|
| Recognize that the news is _designed_ to make you angry because
| that anger _prevents_ you from taking any form of effective
| action, it misdirects your energy and consumes your focus. It
| is a means of control, leading you to confuse catharsis with
| praxis.
|
| By all means, be concerned about the world, injustice, social
| inequality, etc. There is a lot to be concerned about. But
| anger - much less the indignant virtue signaling anger you're
| displaying here, is a waste of time.
| opportune wrote:
| This, unless you are physically protesting (in a way that's
| legitimately disruptive and not symbolic), campaigning, or
| otherwise actually doing something beyond voting, how angry
| you are (or more generally how passionately you feel about an
| issue) doesn't affect the outcome much if at all.
|
| This was a key step towards improving my own mental health by
| unplugging from news. I do care about things like abortion
| and crime, and I vote accordingly, but the amount I am
| outraged does not affect the outcome. So consuming media that
| merely outrages me and tries to grab my attention, but not in
| a way that galvanizes me to actually do something about it
| beyond voting and word of mouth, just worsens my mental state
| to no benefit.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >indignant virtue signaling anger you're displaying here
|
| Fuck off with your assumptions, you don't know me. You don't
| know the actions I have taken.
|
| Anger doesn't prevent people from taking action or
| coordinating, that's the purpose of pushing people into
| basically wage slavery. Bad political actors WANT you to stop
| having a reaction to the things they do. They WANT you to
| feel hopeless and helpless. A politically apathetic
| population is the goal.
|
| Look at Russia right now. Nobody to rise up and stop literal
| genocide. Or 1930s Germany. People can get desensitized to
| bad things happening constantly, but purposely defanging
| reality to be more palatable definitely doesn't help that,
| and only serves to reach that end state more effectively.
|
| These people telling you that you are only angry because
| headlines are designed to make you angry aren't trying to
| help. NYT trumping up something stupid is NOT the problem. A
| problem is people thinking that lots of anger inducing
| headlines is not an accurate reflection of reality, but some
| sort of "bias" or "misleading".
| krapp wrote:
| > Fuck off with your assumptions, you don't know me. You
| don't know the actions I have taken.
|
| And I couldn't care less. Here, you're just posturing for
| karma like everyone else.
|
| >Anger doesn't prevent people from taking action or
| coordinating, that's the purpose of pushing people into
| basically wage slavery. Bad political actors WANT you to
| stop having a reaction to the things they do. They WANT you
| to feel hopeless and helpless. A politically apathetic
| population is the goal.
|
| The opposite of anger isn't apathy, or feeling hopeless or
| helpless. Those are more often than not the results of
| anger. The opposite of anger is reason. Coordination and
| action only happen once you move past the narratives of
| anger. You _can 't_ do anything about most of what you see
| on the news, so there's no point in getting angry about it.
|
| Yes, anger doesn't prevent people from taking action, but
| being angry from the news isn't necessary for that, only
| caring enough about the issue enough to take action. More
| often than not anger leads to apathy, hopelessness and
| helplessness.
|
| >Look at Russia right now. Nobody to rise up and stop
| literal genocide.
|
| People are losing their lives fighting Russia every day.
| What the fuck are you talking about?
|
| >A problem is people thinking that lots of anger inducing
| headlines is not an accurate reflection of reality, but
| some sort of "bias" or "misleading".
|
| It isn't an accurate reflection of reality. It's not
| entirely inaccurate but it is always biased and misleading.
| And the narratives on social media even more so.
|
| But hey, you go ahead and get as angry as you like. I'm
| sure you'll let us all know when it leads you anywhere.
| skaushik92 wrote:
| I agree that having an emotional response can help trigger
| societal change but it's important to distinguish emotion that
| comes from within you after seeing information and you being
| fed content that is intentionally emotionally triggering. I
| agree that injustice shouldn't be ignored but letting people
| think and feel it for themselves can be more powerful and
| impactful long term than being force-fed what to feel, which
| can result in people not fully realizing what they're
| supporting and also moving on to the next thing that comes up.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| I never said to be driven by the emotional reaction, but
| rather that the emotional reaction to current world events is
| the expected outcome. Still plenty of room to attempt to fix
| things rationally and through careful consideration
| unpopularopp wrote:
| The most watched and read US news site has not a single
| submission on the front page [0]
|
| Wonder if you can make Fox News boring too.
|
| 0, https://www.forbes.com/sites/markjoyella/2023/02/01/fox-
| news...
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