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Leaving aside weapon and security purposes, full-length book summary strikes me as especially dystopian. In truth, I think this is something AI is capable of d

Leaving aside weapon and security purposes, full-length book summary strikes me as especially dystopian. In truth, I think this is something AI is capable of doing, but are we really comfortable in passing information through an interface where we cannot even know what is lost. This topic begs so many questions that I guess are not unique to this problem. Who is all of this intelligence for, though? What if we forget how to write well?

DennisP 5y ago
It's not like summaries have to entirely replace whole books. Personally I have a library on my kindle that's too much for me to read in full, considering I'm constantly adding to it. I read a lot of books but good summaries strike me as an improvement for the cases where I either never get to a book, or just read its first several chapters. For the books I do fully read, summaries could make for nice reviews. With some further development, it seems this technology could turn the summaries into quiz questions, which would really help lock in long-term learning.
- DiggyJohnson 5y ago
  Oh I'm not dissing this particular endeavour or anything-I more meant to point out that I was surprised by my own initial reaction was so negative. There are certainly uses for summaries, and by no means does a summary replace the existence of the original text.
  - woko 5y ago
    Keep in mind that the real goal here was to "test scalable alignment techniques", and OpenAI ended up adopting "recursive task decomposition". That is basically a "divide and conquer" approach for simultaneously learning a complex task *and* allowing humans to evaluate it. > To test scalable alignment techniques, we trained a model to summarize entire books. [...] This work is part of our ongoing research into aligning advanced AI systems, which is key to our mission. As we train our models to do increasingly complex tasks, making informed evaluations of the models’ outputs will become increasingly difficult for humans. [...] Our progress on book summarization is the first large-scale empirical work on scaling alignment techniques.

DennisP 5y ago

It's not like summaries have to entirely replace whole books. Personally I have a library on my kindle that's too much for me to read in full, considering I'm constantly adding to it. I read a lot of books but good summaries strike me as an improvement for the cases where I either never get to a book, or just read its first several chapters. For the books I do fully read, summaries could make for nice reviews. With some further development, it seems this technology could turn the summaries into quiz questions, which would really help lock in long-term learning.

DiggyJohnson 5y ago
Oh I'm not dissing this particular endeavour or anything-I more meant to point out that I was surprised by my own initial reaction was so negative. There are certainly uses for summaries, and by no means does a summary replace the existence of the original text.
- woko 5y ago
  Keep in mind that the real goal here was to "test scalable alignment techniques", and OpenAI ended up adopting "recursive task decomposition". That is basically a "divide and conquer" approach for simultaneously learning a complex task *and* allowing humans to evaluate it. > To test scalable alignment techniques, we trained a model to summarize entire books. [...] This work is part of our ongoing research into aligning advanced AI systems, which is key to our mission. As we train our models to do increasingly complex tasks, making informed evaluations of the models’ outputs will become increasingly difficult for humans. [...] Our progress on book summarization is the first large-scale empirical work on scaling alignment techniques.