[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]".