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The crucial line: > But again, there’s nothing to stop this. These subreddits can’t only fill themselves with joke articles to screw up a site like this, even

The crucial line: > But again, there’s nothing to stop this. These subreddits can’t only fill themselves with joke articles to screw up a site like this, even if this one specific example is good for a laugh. Most threads will be normal conversations, and reddit (and other discussion sites) can serve as a simple way of summarizing and generating news for 'free'. I'm thinking that HN too could serve as a source for tech related news, couldn't it? Summarize the target article, then join it up with summaries/sentiments of the top comments in the thread. I didn't say I'm doing it, but if I could think of it, someone's probably way ahead of me already and has tried it.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
They can't only do that but they can embarrass someone who's passing an AI writer off as human. At minimum, they'll have to message in some way that the article was written by AI lest this trick is pulled to embarrass an author which was otherwise considered to be human.
pdpi 3y ago
Even if you don't want to just summarise the comments, you can view the comments section for most articles as crowd-sourced research on the topic. You can easily walk away from most interesting discussions here with a shortlist of topical articles, books, etc, and often some colour commentary straight from the horse's mouth.
nfjro8 3y ago
Anon because I know startups working on that exist and should not talk about it Information wants to be free; right now it’s a browser plugin that reads DOM and allows tagging; that human work is fed into a training system The idea started as make Twitter community notes it’s own thing as browser plug-in and then expanded into model training to look like a user browsing the web and read DOM Not hitting an API, so no fees yes? It’s the user making the interaction choice Rate limits are going to be the only defense against AI trained to look like doom scrollers
frozenlettuce 3y ago
I created a website that does the following: - pick HN items with more than 400 votes - gather their titles in a list - ask the AI to filter out the ones that are not tech-related (bay-area topics, politics) - scrape selected articles - write summaries - publish static website other sources are reddit subreddits and rss feeds (official languages' blogs and github's releases page). The AI is quite gullible. That can be avoided by giving it more context and having a review step where you make sure that you are enforcing your editorial rules. Another thing that I've been wondering is having a cheaper model (gpt-turbo-3.5) write articles and then use a more sophisticated to review them (gpt4)
- lostlogin 3y ago
  > I created a website I’d really like to see this - any chance we could?
  - frozenlettuce 3y ago
    It's https://dev-radar.com/ https://dev-radar.com/, the repository is https://github.com/lfarroco/news-radar https://github.com/lfarroco/news-radar
    - CrazyStat 3y ago
      Very difficult to read on mobile.
      - frozenlettuce 3y ago
        that's true! added some responsive classes to the columns
        CrazyStat 3y ago
        Thanks, looks much better now!
    - lostlogin 3y ago
edavison1 3y ago
I keep hearing this sentiment on HN and IRL. As a journalist I think it misses the mark somewhat by failing to account for the value of reporting. While some news can be generated exclusively from scraping Reddit threads or whatever, most decent journalism incorporates some form of reporting, i.e. the generation of novel information from trusted sources. Even without reporting, if you can't add to the store of knowledge in the world by writing the article, it doesn't offer any value to consumers or advertisers. That includes the the world of SEO spam. An effort has to be made to distinguish your work from the competition, or else your site isn't winning those top results. Reddit threads are often just full of emotional responses to news already generated in this way. At some point along the line, a human has gone out and spoken to another human, forming an novel angle or argument, pursuing a line of inquiry, connected dots no one else has yet etc. That's news, not a summary of existing attitudes.
- Levitz 3y ago
  >I keep hearing this sentiment on HN and IRL. As a journalist I think it misses the mark somewhat by failing to account for the value of reporting. There is valor added by journalists in even niche sectors. A journalist that reports on cars knows about the industry itself and can give an informed take on different developments, he might know how a car works, he might know about different trends in design, or markets, or whatever else. That is his added value. When it comes to videogame journalism, though, they act as little more than spokespeople for corporations. They generally don't understand the product or how it works (mechanically or in terms of design), and in some cases aren't even adept at playing videogames themselves. The only thing the world would lose if no game journalist ever mentioned WoW again and the devs communicated directly with the playerbase would be the appearance of impartiality journalists give.
  - edavison1 3y ago
    I am hardly a luminary of my field but if you take a look at some of my features you’ll see they are drastically different from the idea you may have in your head. Lots of folks more accomplished than me who hit way harder. All the coverage about crunch, for instance, or sexual harassment scandals at big companies—-these are topics broken by games journos. If your only exposure to this world is shitty SEO spam or cleverly-disguised marketing, I could see why you’d think the way you do. But there is so much good games journalism out there. I don’t recommend writing off the field like that.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago

They can't only do that but they can embarrass someone who's passing an AI writer off as human. At minimum, they'll have to message in some way that the article was written by AI lest this trick is pulled to embarrass an author which was otherwise considered to be human.

pdpi 3y ago

Even if you don't want to just summarise the comments, you can view the comments section for most articles as crowd-sourced research on the topic. You can easily walk away from most interesting discussions here with a shortlist of topical articles, books, etc, and often some colour commentary straight from the horse's mouth.

nfjro8 3y ago

Anon because I know startups working on that exist and should not talk about it Information wants to be free; right now it’s a browser plugin that reads DOM and allows tagging; that human work is fed into a training system The idea started as make Twitter community notes it’s own thing as browser plug-in and then expanded into model training to look like a user browsing the web and read DOM Not hitting an API, so no fees yes? It’s the user making the interaction choice Rate limits are going to be the only defense against AI trained to look like doom scrollers

frozenlettuce 3y ago

I created a website that does the following: - pick HN items with more than 400 votes - gather their titles in a list - ask the AI to filter out the ones that are not tech-related (bay-area topics, politics) - scrape selected articles - write summaries - publish static website other sources are reddit subreddits and rss feeds (official languages' blogs and github's releases page). The AI is quite gullible. That can be avoided by giving it more context and having a review step where you make sure that you are enforcing your editorial rules. Another thing that I've been wondering is having a cheaper model (gpt-turbo-3.5) write articles and then use a more sophisticated to review them (gpt4)

lostlogin 3y ago
> I created a website I’d really like to see this - any chance we could?
- frozenlettuce 3y ago
  It's https://dev-radar.com/ https://dev-radar.com/, the repository is https://github.com/lfarroco/news-radar https://github.com/lfarroco/news-radar
  - CrazyStat 3y ago
    Very difficult to read on mobile.
    - frozenlettuce 3y ago
      that's true! added some responsive classes to the columns
      - CrazyStat 3y ago
        Thanks, looks much better now!
  - lostlogin 3y ago

edavison1 3y ago

I keep hearing this sentiment on HN and IRL. As a journalist I think it misses the mark somewhat by failing to account for the value of reporting. While some news can be generated exclusively from scraping Reddit threads or whatever, most decent journalism incorporates some form of reporting, i.e. the generation of novel information from trusted sources. Even without reporting, if you can't add to the store of knowledge in the world by writing the article, it doesn't offer any value to consumers or advertisers. That includes the the world of SEO spam. An effort has to be made to distinguish your work from the competition, or else your site isn't winning those top results. Reddit threads are often just full of emotional responses to news already generated in this way. At some point along the line, a human has gone out and spoken to another human, forming an novel angle or argument, pursuing a line of inquiry, connected dots no one else has yet etc. That's news, not a summary of existing attitudes.

Levitz 3y ago
>I keep hearing this sentiment on HN and IRL. As a journalist I think it misses the mark somewhat by failing to account for the value of reporting. There is valor added by journalists in even niche sectors. A journalist that reports on cars knows about the industry itself and can give an informed take on different developments, he might know how a car works, he might know about different trends in design, or markets, or whatever else. That is his added value. When it comes to videogame journalism, though, they act as little more than spokespeople for corporations. They generally don't understand the product or how it works (mechanically or in terms of design), and in some cases aren't even adept at playing videogames themselves. The only thing the world would lose if no game journalist ever mentioned WoW again and the devs communicated directly with the playerbase would be the appearance of impartiality journalists give.
- edavison1 3y ago
  I am hardly a luminary of my field but if you take a look at some of my features you’ll see they are drastically different from the idea you may have in your head. Lots of folks more accomplished than me who hit way harder. All the coverage about crunch, for instance, or sexual harassment scandals at big companies—-these are topics broken by games journos. If your only exposure to this world is shitty SEO spam or cleverly-disguised marketing, I could see why you’d think the way you do. But there is so much good games journalism out there. I don’t recommend writing off the field like that.