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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

#321

Post by digging »

rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote: post #252
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…

This is why I am just as skeptical of criticism of the media. Everyone wants to consume their work, but they need people to pay for it so that they can keep working, but people won’t consume their work unless it’s sensational.

> but people won’t consume their work unless it’s sensational.

I think this is only true because we allow unlimited sensationalism. It's just like any other junk intake (candy, social media, gamification, etc) - it's easy, it has an immediate reward, and it's not valuable. But out bodies and brains were conditioned by evolution to only care about the first 2, so junk news is just hacking our brains (or exploiting our vulnerabilities).

To be blunt, we've turned something that should serve us into a parasite. We need to have awareness of this and put create standards and/or regulations. When the playing field is level and (almost) nobody is writing clickbait, our brains will return to normal.

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

#322

Post by digging »

skeaker wrote: post #234
calibas wrote: post #227

The title from Boring Report: > The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Performance on Switch Article's title: > Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom’s Performance On Switch Sounds Like A Minor Miracle I find the Boring Report summary to be much more informative that the article, it's like they trimmed away all the fat. The fact that the game runs at 20-30 FPS doesn't seem like a "minor miracle", by 2023 standards that's ba…

Disagree. If you understand that the switch hardware is very limiting, you understand that the game runs despite that, and you understand the usage of hyperbole to emphasize how bad the switch hardware is for 2023, the original title should make perfect sense. It's also more informative on what the article will contain since you can infer that it will specifically talk about the hardware and its limitations, whereas…

But it's still sensationalized. It could instead be something like:

"[Zelda] Performance on the Switch is Passable and Impressive under the Limitations of Hardware"

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

#323

Post by TheCaptain4815 »

haldujai wrote: post #209
TheCaptain4815 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m thinking a multi model approach from classification of a “bias” to the rewriting. In a perfect world I’d also incorporate a database of scraped tweets and one day video dialog. Idk about you, but I’d love to see the most racist tweets from a NYT or WSJ journalist, along with the articles they’ve written, a score associated with their content, etc.

This presupposes that NYT or WSJ journalists are making racist tweets in violation of ToS, workplace ethics policies, and basic human decency. Seeing as you’re making a very serious allegation do you have any proof? I absolutely do not want to live in a world where I (or anyone) am worried that everything said will be publicly assigned an arbitrary “racist” score by a black box. I think most people would agree.

Totally agree and I'd love it if journalists had integrity and weren't biased like before. Unfortunately, that's no longer the case. Ai shall teach us the truth.

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

#324

Post by somenameforme »

nomilk wrote: post #257
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…

> 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 That's a feature, not a bug. The 'news' is 90% useless, if not descrutive, information. Ask yourself: what percentage of the news is optimal to maintain your worldly wisdom? I'd guess about 1%. So getting it down to 10% is half way there, on a logarithmic scale.

I'd bring it down to 0%. Thomas Jefferson explained why as well as any could [1]:

---

To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted so as to be most useful, I should answer ‘by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.’ yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. it is a melancholy truth that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it’s benefits, than is done by it’s abandoned prostitution to falsehood.

Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. the real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time: whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables.

General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will &c &c. but no details can be relied on. I will add that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. he who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.

Thomas Jefferson, 1807

---

The most interesting thing is that this would have sounded quite hyperbolic but 10 years ago, and probably near to completely unreasonable 30 years ago. Yet now? It sounds completely reasonable. Like so many things in history show, the era we're entering into is not some wild uncharted domain, as it sometimes feels. Rather the era we all lived and grew up in was the weird one. Now we're simply returning to 'normalcy.'

[1] - https://www.founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/99-01-...

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

#325

Post by dragonwriter »

somenameforme wrote: post #324
nomilk wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 That's a feature, not a bug. The 'news' is 90% useless, if not descrutive, information. Ask yourself: what percentage of the news is optimal to maintain your worldly wisdom? I'd guess about 1%. So getting it down to 10% is half way there, on a logarithmic scale.

I'd bring it down to 0%. Thomas Jefferson explained why as well as any could [1]: --- To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted so as to be most useful, I should answer ‘by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.’ yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. it is a melancholy truth that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the na…

> The most interesting thing is that this would have sounded quite hyperbolic but 10 years ago, and probably near to completely unreasonable 30 years ago. Yet now it sounds, at the minimum, completely reasonable.

Ironically, it was more reasonable 10 years ago, and even more reasonable 30 years ago. The difference is that the alignment between the ideological and institutional biases throughout the media (in the US) was more uniform 10 years ago, and even moreso 30 years ago, so if you ran into lies (including lies of story selection and detail omission, as well as the more direct falsehoods), they’d be more likely to be the same lies from every source, leaving no reason to question them.

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

#326

Post by skeaker »

calibas wrote: post #236
skeaker wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. If you understand that the switch hardware is very limiting, you understand that the game runs despite that, and you understand the usage of hyperbole to emphasize how bad the switch hardware is for 2023, the original title should make perfect sense. It's also more informative on what the article will contain since you can infer that it will specifically talk about the hardware and its limitations, whereas…

It's not that you're explicitly wrong, it's that you and the article are putting a very positive spin on what is objectively mediocre performance. I could just as easily put a negative spin on it, and suggest there's something wrong with the fact that the Switch can barely run modern games. For the record, I own a Switch and I'm thinking about buying the new Zelda game... I just like facts more than spin.

I care more about the loss of information than the spin in the title. The new title objectively gives you less information about what the article will actually contain even if it is less biased. The natural extreme of this would be a program that strips the titles of articles out entirely: It would be guaranteed to remove all bias from titles every time, at the cost of obfuscating what the actual contents of the article will be.

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

#327

Post by Vox_Leone »

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.

The calm, serene assurance and objectivity of the GPT outputs have been a breath of fresh air amidst the stupidity of the average social media discourse. If this style somehow prevails it will be a net positive for the internet. I for one welcome our new LLM overlords!

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

#328

Post by skeaker »

digging wrote: post #322
skeaker wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. If you understand that the switch hardware is very limiting, you understand that the game runs despite that, and you understand the usage of hyperbole to emphasize how bad the switch hardware is for 2023, the original title should make perfect sense. It's also more informative on what the article will contain since you can infer that it will specifically talk about the hardware and its limitations, whereas…

But it's still sensationalized. It could instead be something like: "[Zelda] Performance on the Switch is Passable and Impressive under the Limitations of Hardware"

This is up to personal interpretation. Some would certainly argue that calling it "impressive" is still sensationalizing it. There is no clear line that should not be crossed when it comes to this sort of thing.

To be honest I think that the burden of this sort of issue lies with the reader. If you read "small miracle" in the original title and are able to correctly interpret the meaning of that ("The game runs despite hardware limitations"), there isn't really any problem with that. If you read it to mean "The switch is literally a miracle, Nintendo programmers have done something previously thought impossible," it's on you for failing to understand the intent of the author. The author should not have to police their language just because someone somewhere does not understand hyperbole or metaphor.

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

#329

Post by somenameforme »

dragonwriter wrote: post #325
somenameforme wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd bring it down to 0%. Thomas Jefferson explained why as well as any could [1]: --- To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted so as to be most useful, I should answer ‘by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.’ yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. it is a melancholy truth that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the na…

> The most interesting thing is that this would have sounded quite hyperbolic but 10 years ago, and probably near to completely unreasonable 30 years ago. Yet now it sounds, at the minimum, completely reasonable. Ironically, it was more reasonable 10 years ago, and even more reasonable 30 years ago. The difference is that the alignment between the ideological and institutional biases throughout the media (in the US)…

Can you offer any examples? In modern times I'd appeal to something like the lies surrounding the death of Officer Sicknick [1] as an example of exactly what you are describing. The entire story that he was murdered, let alone in the precise and brutal fashion described, could have been trivially falsified by any journalist doing the most basic things every journalist does: speak to the family, call the coroner, look at police records, and so on endlessly. Seemingly none did, which rather blunts Hanlon's razor.

That razor goes from blunted to decimated once one also looks to the media response once those lies were definitively revealed. Instead of seeking explanation, and reckoning, over a death being exploited and politicized with the most cynical of lies, the media simply moved onto a new lie about the story (that he was killed by pepper spray) before ultimately just burying it. I'd contrast this against something like Iraq in that one could, at least plausibly, claim ignorance on part of the media. I'd also note that there was some serious push-back from the media once the lies were revealed, and also much less homogeny even in the interim.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Brian_Sicknick

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