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

boringreport.org

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

#91

Post by 082349872349872 »

gumballindie wrote: post #88

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: af…

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.

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

#92

Post by a13o »

malcolmgreaves wrote: post #7

> 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 t…

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.

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

#93

Post by nomel »

shrimpx wrote: post #90

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.

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.

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

#96

Post by ghotli »

madeofpalk wrote: post #29
morsch wrote: post #22

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. Simi…

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.

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.

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

#98

Post by gumballindie »

082349872349872 wrote: post #91
gumballindie wrote: post #88

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: af…

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.

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.

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

#99

Post by lizardking »

chankstein38 wrote: post #66

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 ab…

I’m not sure that’s a flaw

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

#100

Post by rswerve »

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.

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