Show HN: Attabit – AI powered news

Show HN: Attabit – AI powered news(attabit.com)

53 points by gordondavidf 2 years ago | 41 comments

Hi HN! I built a GPT powered tool that searches for today's top news, creates article summaries with GPT4, and will even read those summaries aloud while scrolling down the page for you (just click 'Play Audio').

I instruct GPT4 to be as neutral (politically) as possible and to not cover tragedies with no historical significance.

What you get is a news site that heavily respects your time.

I've had a lot of fun building this for friends and family. I can imagine a future where we all have a personal version of this, searching for news we care about and eventually going beyond just aggregation and moving on to custom reporting.

Check it out and let me know your thoughts? Thanks.

crestfallen 2 years ago |

This is really cool. Thanks for making it! I think the factual (not calling it neutral) POV is the correct one. The length of the text is good for the summary; not too little but not too much either. Though I do agree with other commenters that a "go deeper" type action could be neat. The presentation works for me.

A profile of some kind could be nice for down the road. What kind of news stories do you want to see?

One thing most news is AWFUL at is the timeline of the topic in an easy digestible way. Let's say it's the conflict in the middle east. Sure, here's the new story from today. Most outlets may put a link or two to a related story, but other than the relation, there's not much more context to it.

Within the story block — or as a separate section or something? — it would be cool to have almost like a "timeline" summary view. Here's how this thing/topic started and changed and here's how we got to where we are today. Maybe that's an overall summary of several stories. Maybe it's a general overview with links to all the specific stories over time. I'm not sure. But it keeps getting updated with additional news. Tough problem to solve I think.

That would be an absolutely killer feature, IMO. It would add some much needed context to the news bites today, where it can be awfully easy to forget there's more to it than this one article.

gordondavidf 2 years ago | |

Thanks for checking it out and commenting!

I 100% agree with this and have been thinking of how it can be solved. I think embeddings open a new opportunity to get this off the ground. Worried it will include too much noise by default (Does every Elon story in chronological order come up with the latest Tesla news? Maybe? Maybe only if the target of the article is Tesla?)

You're right news is bad at this, its too hard without new tools to solve. This is a great feature request. I'll get to work. Thanks again.

dr_kiszonka 2 years ago |

It looks nice, but the news, while possibly factual, is very depressing. I saw something about airstrikes, powerful storms, decapitation, and the death of a famous actor. Maybe you could balance the stories a bit?

(I would be interested in a site with factual, interesting stories about non-ephemeral and not always depressing issues and trends.)

gordondavidf 2 years ago | |

Thanks for checking it out and commenting. Its been a rough news day or two on the site unfortunately. This is definitely something I'm thinking about. Best idea I have at the moment (which is implemented) is to cover great science/tech advances as well. That's kinda the most positive high impact news out there.

If you have any ideas on where to find more positive need-to-know news, I'm definitely all ears.

unraveller 2 years ago |

I like the design. Little jitter trying to scroll though. I just wish you could filter by news source. It would be cool if you could filter by types of stories which have a certain bend, like "show me only those stories which are highly similar to the types of stories the org used to run from 1970-2015. Or always temper this source with that one for balance.

There ain't much point in hiding the clickbait title from your view if you are still going to read the summarized thoughts of a clickbait specialist. It's a problem that extends further than the title, the stench of it remains.

gordondavidf 2 years ago | |

Thanks for the notes and for checking it out.

Right now it obviously just covers existing news articles but the future (of this or something like this) is for each news story to be a reporting on what's happening separate from what any individual news source says. Maybe it checks multiple news sources, their primary sources, social media etc. Ideally it would do the work to determine what is happening and what is relevant for you -- many searches around the internet per story.

Not sure how to pull this off but 10 years from now I feel like that would be the norm? And it would personalize it to anything you want in any tone you want. You want honest news in the style of a pirate? Arrr-here ye go.

shouche 2 years ago |

I liked the idea. A good start to a promising app. It does need some features to make it useful and some other improvement ts on UX. People have listed others, but I would like a filter or search at least for starters. Also, progressive disclosure on the news details.

On the cost side, you could try Gemini Pro, currently free with usage limitations. But since the content is saved, it should be fine.

How are you sourcing news and deciding what news to keep? Search engine or some kind of feedback? Would like more details here.

joshka 2 years ago |

Image is too large, often useless for context and generally wasted space. Too much text per article means generally one screen page per article (consider just showing one line and having an expand button that shows the extra context). compare nytimes.com for example - you can see 9 stories on the front page even with two large images. No idea what the tick means

I'd aim for at least 4-6 articles showing in screen at once.

gordondavidf 2 years ago | |

Hey Joshka! Thanks for checking it out and commenting. I like the one article per page format over a click -- easy to scroll along and see what I want without much interaction. I get why someone might want different though or prefer no images. V1 of the site was full black and white newspaper style with many columns -- closer to what you're saying.

unshavedyak 2 years ago |

Looks cool! Very early impression is that i like it.

- I'd appreciate some ways to exhaust the list, though. Ie being able to just listen to yesterdays news and get a start-to-finish experience.

- I love the playback. Feels very natural, sounds good.

- The length of each post feels great. Just slightly longer than reading titles on something like Reddit or w/e, but not so long that i'm feeling much - if any - cost in reading/listening to posts.

unshavedyak 2 years ago | |

I think it would be also really cool to see a "More depth" link, which gives more information on the subject. More stats, contributing factors, etc.

unshavedyak 2 years ago | | |

And finally, assuming this page updates throughout the day, it would be nice if the page kept track of read/listened posts. A "Resume" button along with the play, would be really handy.

I'll keep giving it a try tomorrow/etc, but i like it! Nice job!

jamager 2 years ago |

I like this!

I guess the obvious missing features would be:

- Tailored to personal preferences in terms of language/country, topic, sentiment (eg. positive things happening in the world) - Summary with the top X news of the day (in 1 line per entry) - Links to source articles

And bonus points: detect and show fake news circulating on the internet

gordondavidf 2 years ago | |

Thanks! Topic filtering definitely on the way. Sentiment is a really cool idea -- especially if you want to filter by it. Will have to think about that.

My thoughts on language/country: Will stay away from this from now and focus just on English US. I'm a one man shop and this is fully a side project. With the low concern of misreporting something, I want to make sure I understand everything on the site.

Would be required in the long term vision though for sure.

Thanks for checking it out and commenting!

joshka 2 years ago |

An interesting feature to try on this might be to have several sentiment modes to try out. I.e. what if you hade a neutral perspective, a conservative one and a progressive one available as easily as it is to click a dark/light mode button? What if you had some more custom modes that are targeted at providing news that fits the user's perspective / interest more and that would shape the summaries to align with the perspective "I am a software developer that enjoys news about technological innovation and related industry news"

gordondavidf 2 years ago | |

10 years from now I definitely think we'll have personal AI's in our pocket updating us on what's going on. They will cater to our preferences and (i hope) heavily look into stories while telling us about them.

The best future is where everyone gets a super powered reporter in their pocket.

BrandoElFollito 2 years ago |

I am French and by scrolling I saw some news on current events and a lot about the US.

It would be fantastic to be able to influence the news in how pinpointed the news is. A drough or atrack I do not care. News that a are historically relevant: very much (and stories apps these)

illegalmemory 2 years ago |

I recently made something similar. I started with the same foundation you currently have (aim to make "neutral" and "de-sensationalized") but ultimately narrowed my focus exclusively to Developer news (since I couldn't achieve desired results). There were always something amiss.

drcongo 2 years ago |

I wasn't expecting to like this at all but I was pleasantly surprised. It seems a bit US focussed but I like where it's going, being able to tailor some preferences on it could be a real winner.

gordondavidf 2 years ago | |

Glad you liked it! Thanks for checking it out. Very US focused at the moment for sure. Having it be more personalized would be awesome -- in a sense that's what I've built for myself here -- long term I (or someone) have to give that to the people. "Search the internet for me and tell me what's happening"

hsshah 2 years ago |

Nice implementation. I like it.

In addition to source/topic customization that others have already mentioned; it would be nice to be able to ask follow up questions on a news story that one would like to know more.

gordondavidf 2 years ago | |

Thanks for checking it out and commenting!

THAT would be really cool. Especially with voice while its reading the articles to you.

zipping1549 2 years ago |

How much does this cost? It'd be awesome if something like this can be selfhosted & tweaked for my personal preference. Is there any chance that this might go opensource?

guizzy 2 years ago | |

I don't have it set up to publish a website, but maybe you'll be interested in this tool I made for myself. https://github.com/GuizzyQC/FeedSummarizer

It will take an RSS feed, send the content of x number of articles to an OpenAI-compatible API to summarize, then send me an email with all of those summaries. I have it set to run every day so I wake up to a summary of my feeds (and of Hacker News).

I figure it would not be too difficult to feed the contents to a static site generator.

Karrot_Kream 2 years ago | | |

Have you had any trouble with BeautifulSoup? I've thought about doing something similar but wanted something more robust with scraping. I've thought about using Puppeteer.

gordondavidf 2 years ago | |

Its currently 'expensive' ($3 per day) for the individual user level to run this but once you open it up to a one to many model, that's extremely reasonable.

Recording and editing the audio alone would be a massive expense and the code does this multiple times per day all for under a dollar.

But the individual costs will surely come down as models get better. I'm not sure what the plans are yet for it but I'm hoping to make it useful to people.

BizarroLand 2 years ago |

Looks cool, I like it, but given AIs propensity to outright lie to us (hallucinate), what steps are being taken to verify the facts of the summaries it is giving?

guizzy 2 years ago | |

It's quite unlikely to hallucinate in this because it's not asked to answer a question from information it was trained on; the facts in the summaries are fed in the context of the request.

That's not to say it will always get everything right of course; in my experimentation with LLM-powered summarization of news articles, I find the thing it would more often struggle with is quote attribution. The way some writers formulate who said what in a conversation sometimes confused the models I use (mostly Mixtral these days, which is about GPT 3.5 level), and it would claim that someone said something that I knew this person definitely did not say, and I would check the actual article and it turned out the journalist said that thing and the interviewee said the opposite, but the LLM thought it was the interviewee who said it.

gordondavidf 2 years ago | |

@guizzy has it right. Much more unlikely to hallucinate because all of the information it needs is submitted in the API request -- its actually explicitly asked to not come up with anything new.

Of course though this is a concern that needs to be closely watched as AI summaries become more common in the world.

secondary_op 2 years ago |

> searches for today's top news, creates article summaries

> What you get is a news site that heavily respects your time.

> No spin or clickbait -- just the facts of what's happening.

> February 03 Yesterday - CNN - US Conducts Retaliatory Airstrikes on Iranian-Backed Militias in Iraq and Syria

This is completely delusional. What I see here is hand picked stream of sources comprised of Journalism and Media Industrial Complex networks of large conglomerates. What they do ? Spin, clickbait, lie, and propaganda machines on payroll of US elites. So you slap LLM on top of this to synthesize neutral garbage from garbage and call this job done ?

> going beyond just aggregation and moving on to custom reporting.

To custom garbage bubble.

gordondavidf 2 years ago | |

This is a v1 for friends and family -- its not done. If you think those news services are 'propaganda machines on payroll of US elites' can you please get to work building an alternative? Thanks.

gremlinsinc 2 years ago |

the light and dark mode seems backward. to get dark mode I click light mode and give versa.

shimylining 2 years ago |

what API are you using to fetch the articles? and how do u decide which articles?

gordondavidf 2 years ago | |

Hey thanks for checking it out! No API, lots of scraping and GPT decides what important stories to cover. Lots of GPT requests but it's cheap and does a great job.

DasCorCor 2 years ago |

Very cool!

gordondavidf 2 years ago | |

Thanks for checking it out and commenting!

the_third_wave 2 years ago |

Getting GPT (any version) to be "politically neutral" seems to be an exercise in futility given that the models have been shown to be inherently biased [1-6]. Given that GPT decides which stories are 'important' this bias immediately comes into play in the form of selection bias. How do you handle this known bias and what is your opinion on your success in getting the output to be as neutral (politically) as possible?

[1] https://www.uea.ac.uk/about/news/article/fresh-evidence-of-c...

[2] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/08/17/openai-chatg...

[3] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-politics-of-ai-chatgp...

[4] https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/18/chatgpt_political_bia...

[5] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10623051/

[6] https://bgr.com/general/openais-chatgpt-has-a-major-politica...

sanxiyn 2 years ago | |

All these "research" are so deeply confused about what GPT is. GPT is an actor acting a persona, not a persona. An actor acts whatever political orientation the role has, they don't act their own political orientation.

These "research" are just testing the default persona, which is easily changed by system prompt. Getting GPT to be politically neutral is trivial, it is far from being an exercise in futility. Ignore all these reports of "research" and test it yourself: I have high success rate and you will have too.