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Show HN: Boring Report, a news app that uses AI to desensationalize the news

boringreport.org

171–180 of 348 posts

Re: Show HN: Boring Report, a news app that uses AI to desensationalize the news

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

Re: Show HN: Boring Report, a news app that uses AI to desensationalize the news

#173

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

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?

Re: Show HN: Boring Report, a news app that uses AI to desensationalize the news

#174
post #116

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…

>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…

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.

Re: Show HN: Boring Report, a news app that uses AI to desensationalize the news

#175
post #12

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?

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

Re: Show HN: Boring Report, a news app that uses AI to desensationalize the news

#176
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?

Re: Show HN: Boring Report, a news app that uses AI to desensationalize the news

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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...

Re: Show HN: Boring Report, a news app that uses AI to desensationalize the news

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

> 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.

Re: Show HN: Boring Report, a news app that uses AI to desensationalize the news

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 sa…

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)?

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