[add-sub-mul-div]

Hard pass. I don't want Google, or even a trustworthy neutral party, to decide my view of the world. (Compromised as it may be already.)

We're all unique and unpredictable. In a given article, a random sentence or point considered throwaway by most people and algorithms could turn out to be meaningful to me.

I've been trained not to even trust the basic facts they pull of out content like movie showtimes or whatever. Once you see it wrong a few times you realize it's folly not to keep the responsibility of finding information yourself.

[uwerewarned]

Google is like a trustworthy neutral party except for the trustworthy and neutral bit

[patrickaljord]

for non political issues it should fine, eg to describe an algorithm or other non-controversial tech issues for example.

[lionkor]

As long as they dont own a product in that field, yeah.

[carlosjobim]

And algorithms and some tech things are probably the only things left that aren't political issues.

Please note if you're reading this, that this comment was written in 2023, before mathematics and physics became highly contended political issues.

[ChildOfChaos]

It's just important to decide what you use it on.

I find these tools useful for articles these days because everything is clickbait and full of bloat and nonsense. Even if it's just to do a first past to figure out if I want to read the full article.

But I do understand your point, I feel this is very important ' a random sentence or point considered throwaway by most people and algorithms could turn out to be meaningful to me.', i've had this issue with book summary services, i've read a book and took completely different meanings or found insight in certain paragraphs that were completely glossed over in book summarys that just changed it into generic sounding nonsense. We need to connect the dots ourselfs and to do that, I believe is not to have someone elses summary of the situation.

However, for everything else a tool like this is useful, there is too much noise in the world, we need tools to filter it and help us understand what is relevant and what is not.

[brookst]

I feel like this is knee-jerk over-generalization.

Having Google summarize a too-long recipe (a problem they created, by the way) into just the simple ingredients and instructions is NOT "deciding your view of the world".

[what_ever]

Pretty sure the long recipes are due to others not being able to copy them if you have long essay describing it or something?

[dragonwriter]

The essay is more protectible by copyright than the recipe itself, but including it doesn’t protect the recipe itself.

I actually think the issue is that the long essay provides more space to put advertising alongside or interrupting the flow.

[doctorpangloss]

I'm not sure why this particular idiosyncratic thing attracts so much mystery, but the answer is that there are long essays about the recipes because people like them.

[Tarball10]

I assumed the long essays were for SEO (inflates the amount of cooking-related keywords). Which would make it kind of ironic that another Google product is now stripping the SEO content back out.

[marricks]

Ok, but people won't use it just for recipes. If it's successful and common place google will monetize it.

The beginning could just be "see this related product or service." Which won't mess with the content. Perhaps that's fine.

I'd argue though that any summarizing tool inherently has a bias. It must choose to ignore certain details and make decisions about what to highlight.

As we understand LLM's more and the stuff that summarizes folks controlling them will be able to make those decisions and the money and power behind that will absolutely abuse it.

That's not even considering the effects this would have on journalism and writing in general if most of it gets summarized.

[brookst]

Too tinfoil for me. Bicycles are bad because someone will try to use one like a helicopter.

And humans already summarize and (mis)characterize. I just don’t see blaming a tool that is used by people as they see fit.

[marricks]

I do if that tool is going to be more centralized then what it replaces.

Seems like a pretty facile argument. Bicycles and helicopters don't need to be trained on ridiculously largest datasets on ridiculously large super computers.

[Andrex]

Maybe Google decides certain ingredients aren't fit for public consumption and changes the recipe in their "summary." Or maybe the FDA tells Google it has to do this.

On a mass scale, maybe 0.2% of people would double check the source page. The rest would be unknowingly influenced to eat "healthier" by Google.

Yes, this seems unlikely. But so has much in the last 5 years.

Why are we deliberately charging head-first into social man-in-the-middle attacks? We already don't trust each other enough. LLMs lie, and lie often. Why should we trust them for anything?

Would you be OK asking a LLM what food is safe for an infant, or a pet dog? Without checking the source?

[brookst]

I think you’re saying that your concerns are moot because nobody would use LLMs the way you fear people will use LLMs?

[morkalork]

But it won't taste the same without knowing the authors childhood trauma!

[JohnFen]

I agree entirely.

I have no interest in AI summarizing anything at all for me. Not because of AI, but because I have no interest in anyone or anything summarizing for me. Too much is lost.

[strikelaserclaw]

Most articles we read (even on HN) have very little useful information compared to lines of sentences, maybe this can act as a summary and we can decide if we want to read the whole article.

[comboy]

> a random sentence or point considered throwaway by most people and algorithms could turn out to be meaningful to me

This is what I crave for in good articles and books. There's some big insight just thrown in in the middle of the sentence because that pattern is already obvious to the author. It's also what AI-generated content is currently lacking because it sticks to the task at hand (but I believe it will change).

Also, your critique applies just as much to human-generated summaries.

My issue with it is that I don't want my browser to send home what I read and view although I guess that ship has sailed some time ago.

[melling]

Actually, we’re not unique and often predictable. There usually is someone who says “I’ll never use the product because…” And it’s often a top comment. e.g. Smartphones with GPS, Amazon Alexa,…

To me it’s simply a noisy discussion with little value. Don’t use it but let’s not waste time debating it. No one’s mind is going to change.

I’d love nothing more than for an algorithm to filter out the noise and extract any information and facts. Learning whose opinion I trust on specific topics would also be useful.

Of course, others will tell me why this doesn’t work for them and they want the added noise. Seriously, the entire point is that some people will want the product while others don’t.

I’m not trying to change your mind, and I’m not trying to stop anyone else from the discussion. It’s simply not for me, in general.

[fhd2]

I find it quite helpful to understand why people don't use a product or are unhappy with it. If there's none of that, all I'm left with is reading marketing claims.

[melling]

Good, then you should set your filter appropriately.

Depending on the effectiveness of the product, you may trust it for certain articles but not others. Certain sources but not others.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

If you don't think you'll change anyone's mind, and aren't trying to, then why are you posting?

[JohnFen]

In all fairness, plenty of people post just to express their opinion or share their knowledge without any intention of changing anyone's mind about anything.

[melling]

Person 1: “An electric vehicle will never work for me because…”

Person 2: “I want an electric vehicle because…”

Is that a better example to convey my point?

[JohnFen]

That's the sort of exchange I want to see. It's useful and educational to hear what works and doesn't work for people, and why. It's not noise at all to me, it's teaching me about the upsides and downsides people have found about a thing in their real lives.

[tsunamifury]

It’s summarizing. That is by its very nature a reduction of an article to certain bias elements. It’s not rocket science or some evil magic. Jeeze you’d think HackerNews never used anything that wasn’t a home brew open source libertarian approved product if you believed the comments here.

[jorgesborges]

Not to mention the clear preference here for comments that summarize an article to avoid actually reading it. Or poison the well sufficiently for a person to say “oh well I already know what it says”.

[GreedClarifies]

"It’s not rocket science or some evil magic"

It sure is.

If you had told people in 2019 that a computer program could summarize large topics and write cogent output you would have been placed in the asylum.

[michaelt]

There's been an "AutoSummarise" tool in Microsoft Word since 2003 [1]

Whats different these days is people might actually trust the tool enough to use it :)

[1] https://www.officetooltips.com/word_2003/tips/getting_to_the...

[rvnx]

In 2013 it was already done by kids: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/yahoo-acquires-summly-app-150...

[probably_wrong]

Sorry, but that's incorrect.

Leaving aside the mind-blowingly large amount of research on summarization that existed in 2019, I'll say this: by then the task was so we'll understood that there were multiple tldr bots on Reddit.

[The_Colonel]

> some evil magic

It can be. Summarizing process can be tweaked very slightly to give more space to certain POVs, make them sound more reliable than others via word choice etc. The subtlety can make it undetectable, yet it can have strong effects when applied on mass scale.

I don't know how this will look like, but it is a very powerful technology to sway the public opinion one way or another.

[GenericPoster]

Can you give some examples and point out the subtleties?

[The_Colonel]

You can already try this with GPT, e.g. "Can you summarize XYZ while giving more attention to its negative impacts on the freedom of individual", contrast with "... to its benefits on the collective wellbeing".

Both will be factually correct, but they will each manipulate the opinion of the non-expert reader by giving more attention to specific facts.

GPT seems to be very strong in being able to present information with some specific accent, e.g. there are many examples of "write this in the style of [person, literary style, political slant]".