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

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

#181

Post by tourmalinetaco »

haldujai wrote: post #157
TeMPOraL wrote: post #149

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.

>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

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

#182

Post by haldujai »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #178
haldujai wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 valua…

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.

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

#183

Post by __loam »

ghotli wrote: post #96
madeofpalk wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even then there's literally nothing stopping it from making shit up.

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

#184

Post by hinkley »

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).

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

#185

Post by startupsfail »

vaskal08 wrote: post #33
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…

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.

Maybe image search and if the image is not novel, ignore it?

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

#186

Post by akira2501 »

You can't copy and paste on desktop. That's thoroughly frustrating, it's understandable, but a more suitable mechanism should be found than strictly disabling it.

From A Random Article[0]:

"In the second case, the court ruled in favor of Louis Ciminelli, a Buffalo developer convicted for taking part in rigging the bid process and property fraud. The justices reversed a lower court ruling based on a theory of law that the government later abandoned."

That might be "boring" to the point of "uninformative." It also gives me strange reminders of the book "Brave New World," and I think most of the authors so edited might feel the same way.

I would presume to _add more_ to the article then to _take away_ from it, in some cases, to the point of blinding the reader from any fact whatsoever.

[0]: https://www.boringreport.org/app/all/645d396cf7c90670355a6c7...

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

#187

Post by heleninboodler »

shireboy wrote: post #83

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 recogniz…

Agree strongly with the "why is this an app?" stance. The front page makes it unclear that there's a web interface at all because your options are big buttons for ios and for "desktop/android". No, I definitely don't want a "desktop" app. I want a web page. So I didn't click it and I closed the window.

When considering installing any app, your first question should be "is there any benefit to the user of making this an app instead of a web page?" The answer is very frequently no, which means effort spent building the app and getting me to install it must be for a purpose that's not in my interests, such as tracking.

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

#188

Post by bagels »

joshribakoff wrote: post #123
mc32 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

AI can just fabricate a new photo for any event.

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

#189

Post by [deleted] »

vaskal08 wrote: post #33
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…

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.

[deleted]

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

#190

Post by mk89 »

toss1 wrote: post #154
ethbr0 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

>>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

Honestly given the quality of Stable Diffusion and similar, you don't even need to reuse the same image posted somewhere else, you can just make it up. So... making such a huge effort...for what? People will adapt to use new tech.
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