[HN Gopher] Show HN: Attabit - AI powered news
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Show HN: Attabit - AI powered news
Hi HN! I built a GPT powered tool that searches for today's top
news, creates article summaries with GPT4, and will even read those
summaries aloud while scrolling down the page for you (just click
'Play Audio'). I instruct GPT4 to be as neutral (politically) as
possible and to not cover tragedies with no historical
significance. What you get is a news site that heavily respects
your time. I've had a lot of fun building this for friends and
family. I can imagine a future where we all have a personal version
of this, searching for news we care about and eventually going
beyond just aggregation and moving on to custom reporting. Check
it out and let me know your thoughts? Thanks.
Author : gordondavidf
Score : 37 points
Date : 2024-02-02 13:59 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (attabit.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (attabit.com)
| unraveller wrote:
| I like the design. Little jitter trying to scroll though. I just
| wish you could filter by news source. It would be cool if you
| could filter by types of stories which have a certain bend, like
| "show me only those stories which are highly similar to the types
| of stories the org used to run from 1970-2015. Or always temper
| this source with that one for balance.
|
| There ain't much point in hiding the clickbait title from your
| view if you are still going to read the summarized thoughts of a
| clickbait specialist. It's a problem that extends further than
| the title, the stench of it remains.
| gordondavidf wrote:
| Thanks for the notes and for checking it out.
|
| Right now it obviously just covers existing news articles but
| the future (of this or something like this) is for each news
| story to be a reporting on what's happening separate from what
| any individual news source says. Maybe it checks multiple news
| sources, their primary sources, social media etc. Ideally it
| would do the work to determine what is happening and what is
| relevant for you -- many searches around the internet per
| story.
|
| Not sure how to pull this off but 10 years from now I feel like
| that would be the norm? And it would personalize it to anything
| you want in any tone you want. You want honest news in the
| style of a pirate? Arrr-here ye go.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| Looks cool! Very early impression is that i like it.
|
| - I'd appreciate some ways to exhaust the list, though. Ie being
| able to just listen to yesterdays news and get a start-to-finish
| experience.
|
| - I love the playback. Feels very natural, sounds good.
|
| - The length of each post feels great. Just slightly longer than
| reading titles on something like Reddit or w/e, but not so long
| that i'm feeling much - if any - cost in reading/listening to
| posts.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| I think it would be also really cool to see a "More depth"
| link, which gives more information on the subject. More stats,
| contributing factors, etc.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| And finally, assuming this page updates throughout the day,
| it would be nice if the page kept track of read/listened
| posts. A "Resume" button along with the play, would be really
| handy.
|
| I'll keep giving it a try tomorrow/etc, but i like it! Nice
| job!
| gordondavidf wrote:
| This is all fantastic feedback thank you for checking it
| out and taking the time to comment!
|
| Funny you mention the 'Resume' part, I just had to take
| that out because iOS was blocking a new mp3 file from
| playing without a direct touch input from a user. (I get
| why they do this but man was I disappointed). I have an
| idea on how to add it back it. It should 'skip' playing
| articles with a checkbox because you've read or listened to
| them already. Will get this one down -- I want it too.
|
| Thank you again! My email is on the site, please don't
| hesitate to reach out if you think of anything else. Its
| really just some friends and family who like this thing at
| the moment so excited to share it.
| shimylining wrote:
| what API are you using to fetch the articles? and how do u decide
| which articles?
| gordondavidf wrote:
| Hey thanks for checking it out! No API, lots of scraping and
| GPT decides what important stories to cover. Lots of GPT
| requests but it's cheap and does a great job.
| drcongo wrote:
| I wasn't expecting to like this at all but I was pleasantly
| surprised. It seems a bit US focussed but I like where it's
| going, being able to tailor some preferences on it could be a
| real winner.
| gordondavidf wrote:
| Glad you liked it! Thanks for checking it out. Very US focused
| at the moment for sure. Having it be more personalized would be
| awesome -- in a sense that's what I've built for myself here --
| long term I (or someone) have to give that to the people.
| "Search the internet for me and tell me what's happening"
| illegalmemory wrote:
| I recently made something similar. I started with the same
| foundation you currently have (aim to make "neutral" and "de-
| sensationalized") but ultimately narrowed my focus exclusively to
| Developer news (since I couldn't achieve desired results). There
| were always something amiss.
| zipping1549 wrote:
| How much does this cost? It'd be awesome if something like this
| can be selfhosted & tweaked for my personal preference. Is there
| any chance that this might go opensource?
| guizzy wrote:
| I don't have it set up to publish a website, but maybe you'll
| be interested in this tool I made for myself.
| https://github.com/GuizzyQC/FeedSummarizer
|
| It will take an RSS feed, send the content of x number of
| articles to an OpenAI-compatible API to summarize, then send me
| an email with all of those summaries. I have it set to run
| every day so I wake up to a summary of my feeds (and of Hacker
| News).
|
| I figure it would not be too difficult to feed the contents to
| a static site generator.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Have you had any trouble with BeautifulSoup? I've thought
| about doing something similar but wanted something more
| robust with scraping. I've thought about using Puppeteer.
| guizzy wrote:
| It works pretty well. This morning running on what were the
| top 20 articles on Hacker News, it failed to extract data
| for one article and that was only because the link was a
| PDF. On an average day I get one or two failure per 20
| articles, for various reasons (click-throughs, information
| in pictures, PDF links) and I haven't tried very hard to
| improve it.
| gordondavidf wrote:
| Its currently 'expensive' ($3 per day) for the individual user
| level to run this but once you open it up to a one to many
| model, that's extremely reasonable.
|
| Recording and editing the audio alone would be a massive
| expense and the code does this multiple times per day all for
| under a dollar.
|
| But the individual costs will surely come down as models get
| better. I'm not sure what the plans are yet for it but I'm
| hoping to make it useful to people.
| the_third_wave wrote:
| Getting GPT (any version) to be "politically neutral" seems to be
| an exercise in futility given that the models have been shown to
| be inherently biased [1-6]. Given that GPT decides which stories
| are 'important' this bias immediately comes into play in the form
| of selection bias. How do you handle this known bias and what is
| your opinion on your success in getting the output to be _as
| neutral (politically) as possible_?
|
| [1] https://www.uea.ac.uk/about/news/article/fresh-evidence-
| of-c...
|
| [2] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/08/17/openai-
| chatg...
|
| [3] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-politics-of-ai-
| chatgp...
|
| [4]
| https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/18/chatgpt_political_bia...
|
| [5] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10623051/
|
| [6] https://bgr.com/general/openais-chatgpt-has-a-major-
| politica...
| sanxiyn wrote:
| All these "research" are so deeply confused about what GPT is.
| GPT is an actor acting a persona, not a persona. An actor acts
| whatever political orientation the role has, they don't act
| their own political orientation.
|
| These "research" are just testing the default persona, which is
| easily changed by system prompt. Getting GPT to be politically
| neutral is trivial, it is far from being an exercise in
| futility. Ignore all these reports of "research" and test it
| yourself: I have high success rate and you will have too.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| Looks cool, I like it, but given AIs propensity to outright lie
| to us (hallucinate), what steps are being taken to verify the
| facts of the summaries it is giving?
| guizzy wrote:
| It's quite unlikely to hallucinate in this because it's not
| asked to answer a question from information it was trained on;
| the facts in the summaries are fed in the context of the
| request.
|
| That's not to say it will always get everything right of
| course; in my experimentation with LLM-powered summarization of
| news articles, I find the thing it would more often struggle
| with is quote attribution. The way some writers formulate who
| said what in a conversation sometimes confused the models I use
| (mostly Mixtral these days, which is about GPT 3.5 level), and
| it would claim that someone said something that I knew this
| person definitely did not say, and I would check the actual
| article and it turned out the journalist said that thing and
| the interviewee said the opposite, but the LLM thought it was
| the interviewee who said it.
| gordondavidf wrote:
| @guizzy has it right. Much more unlikely to hallucinate because
| all of the information it needs is submitted in the API request
| -- its actually explicitly asked to not come up with anything
| new.
|
| Of course though this is a concern that needs to be closely
| watched as AI summaries become more common in the world.
| jamager wrote:
| I like this!
|
| I guess the obvious missing features would be:
|
| - Tailored to personal preferences in terms of language/country,
| topic, sentiment (eg. positive things happening in the world) -
| Summary with the top X news of the day (in 1 line per entry) -
| Links to source articles
|
| And bonus points: detect and show fake news circulating on the
| internet
| gordondavidf wrote:
| Thanks! Topic filtering definitely on the way. Sentiment is a
| really cool idea -- especially if you want to filter by it.
| Will have to think about that.
|
| My thoughts on language/country: Will stay away from this from
| now and focus just on English US. I'm a one man shop and this
| is fully a side project. With the low concern of misreporting
| something, I want to make sure I understand everything on the
| site.
|
| Would be required in the long term vision though for sure.
|
| Thanks for checking it out and commenting!
| hsshah wrote:
| Nice implementation. I like it.
|
| In addition to source/topic customization that others have
| already mentioned; it would be nice to be able to ask follow up
| questions on a news story that one would like to know more.
| gordondavidf wrote:
| Thanks for checking it out and commenting!
|
| THAT would be really cool. Especially with voice while its
| reading the articles to you.
| joshka wrote:
| Image is too large, often useless for context and generally
| wasted space. Too much text per article means generally one
| screen page per article (consider just showing one line and
| having an expand button that shows the extra context). compare
| nytimes.com for example - you can see 9 stories on the front page
| even with two large images. No idea what the tick means
|
| I'd aim for at least 4-6 articles showing in screen at once.
| gordondavidf wrote:
| Hey Joshka! Thanks for checking it out and commenting. I like
| the one article per page format over a click -- easy to scroll
| along and see what I want without much interaction. I get why
| someone might want different though or prefer no images. V1 of
| the site was full black and white newspaper style with many
| columns -- closer to what you're saying.
| joshka wrote:
| An interesting feature to try on this might be to have several
| sentiment modes to try out. I.e. what if you hade a neutral
| perspective, a conservative one and a progressive one available
| as easily as it is to click a dark/light mode button? What if you
| had some more custom modes that are targeted at providing news
| that fits the user's perspective / interest more and that would
| shape the summaries to align with the perspective "I am a
| software developer that enjoys news about technological
| innovation and related industry news"
| gordondavidf wrote:
| 10 years from now I definitely think we'll have personal AI's
| in our pocket updating us on what's going on. They will cater
| to our preferences and (i hope) heavily look into stories while
| telling us about them.
|
| The best future is where everyone gets a super powered reporter
| in their pocket.
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(page generated 2024-02-02 23:02 UTC)