Comment by TeMPOraL
2 years ago
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.
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.
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>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
Another great idea though also very US centric like the app in this post. Hopefully this comes to more places
It's like trying to make Chinese food using McDonald's Happy Meals for ingredients.
They have McDonald's in China (at least in Shenzhen) - if you were to take ingredients from there, this may actually work.
I would not and do not trust them to do this in cases where I care about the accuracy of the output.
If you care about the accuracy of the output, don’t read news in the first place? I think you’re trumping up the impotence of this use case.