Show HN: Boring Report, a news app that uses AI to desensationalize the news (opens in new tab)

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon testified before a Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs hearing on September 22, 2022. Dimon mentioned that as the U.S. nears a potential default on its sovereign debt, markets could experience panic. ...[1]

He said that today, but in an interview with Bloomberg. The source article[2] just illustrates it with an archive photo from 2022, when he testified in a Senate hearing. Similarly, the Disney article[3] starts non-sensically The Disney+ logo was displayed on a TV screen in Paris on December 26, 2019. Disney shares decreased by 9%[...] (I don't think displaying the logo 4 years ago is to blame).

I suppose you should just stop parsing image subtitles. The two articles I checked were otherwise accurate.

[1] https://www.boringreport.org/app/all/645cfc85bab323b21e6195e... I had to use the developer tools to copy paste the text, obnoxious. You also can't right- or middle-click the source link (to copy it or open it in a background tab). Don't hijack basic browser functionality.

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/11/jpms-jamie-dimon-warns-of-ma...

[3] https://www.boringreport.org/app/all/645d0cebbaef7c040f89ca4...

I think this is an amazing idea! The only flaw I see with it is that without the sensationalized headlines I read through going "Oh that doesn't matter, that doesn't matter either" etc haha I haven't found an article that sounds interesting in a few scrolls.

I mean, it's great because it's accurate. Half of the "news" we're fed is sensationalized so we'll click on it and it's really nothing but it gets us riled up about something that is effectively meaningless to us. This just brings reality to the forefront and makes me realize I don't care about the news lol

Thank you though, this is awesome!

I'm generally excited about something I'm calling "English to English translation" - and this is a good example.

Previously translation has focused on going between languages.

I think there's just as much benefit to translating within a given language.

* Translate corporate speak to plain English.

* Translate passive aggressive to calm and peaceful.

* Translate sensationalist to neutral (like the OP).

* Translate implicit and heavy with subtext to direct and assertive.

The title from Boring Report:

> The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Performance on Switch

Article's title:

> Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom’s Performance On Switch Sounds Like A Minor Miracle

I find the Boring Report summary to be much more informative that the article, it's like they trimmed away all the fat.

The fact that the game runs at 20-30 FPS doesn't seem like a "minor miracle", by 2023 standards that's barely acceptable. And I understand the limitations of the Switch hardware, I'm not trying to insult Nintendo or the Zelda games, but I have hard time using the word "miracle" to describe the performance of a game that runs at 20-30 FPS.

In an ideal world we’d have a network of trusted people that feed trusted event highlights and leave it to ai to fill in the gaps or detect bias. At the moment news is just a collection of episodes and arcs aimed at maintaining a constant state of fear and anger - emotions familiar to all of us. We are designed to pay attention to danger and the media knows this. We should detoxify it. It’s done enough harm.

Edit: after reading some of the content i really like it!

I've also been thinking about processing news with LMs, but from a different angle.

One big complaint I have for reading news through RSS, is that there's no natural hierarchy/priority to the news. There's no front page, no headline, no size in RSS feeds. Given the way news agencies generates those feeds, there are _tons_ of repetition, tiny updates, some insignificant one-liner interview about some significant events. Not to mention the "no update at this point" updates. Entries that are not informative look exactly the same as---but often outnumbers---the entries that are informative.

An ideal news feed processor to me, would be one that reads through last weeks RSS feeds, and merges the all those tiny updates into coherent articles, ranked by the significance of the event. Sort of turning newspaper into a journal.

The merging and reflow should be well-within an LM's capability. However, I'm not sure if OpenAI's API can swallow an entire week's worth of RSS, or produce multiple full-sized articles, but this is something that I'd like to try when I get some free weekends.

Here's an idea, maybe the reason why news is angering and emotional is that there is a lot of bad shit going on in the world that we have just kind of let happen for a long time, and a lot of injustice that shouldn't be ignored, and a lot of people justice ignores that it shouldn't.

Maybe the solution isn't to pretend things are just fine. People keep trying to paint this as some sort of "sensationalism" and "I want just the facts" but the facts are that thousands of people die every day from cheaply and easily preventable illnesses and issues while people who can literally self fund rocketry get to accumulate even more wealth and power.

There's a difference between "remember the maine" and "hey women right now are literally dying because they can't get abortions to remove dead tissue inside their body because of some completely different person believes their religion says doing so is a crime"

Being angry from news like this isn't a bad thing. You SHOULD be angry.

The headline style reminds me of Matt Winkler's "Bloomberg Way" which specified headlines that summarized the article into a single line, see: https://wildtech.mongabay.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/20... or https://www.optionsbro.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Bloomb...

I'm not sure if they always achieved that, but it was at least a goal for readers to be able to skim feeds to understand what was going as quickly as possible. Such a policy was feasible because the readers were paying customers as opposed to web news which are often funded by advertisers or worse.

I've played with a variation of this called "Unbiased News".

The prompt asks to rewrite the article in an unbiased way and to also expose biases in the article. It feels 'good' to use.

Demo here: https://twitter.com/vladquant/status/1647042056139968512

Code and prompt here: https://github.com/OrionBrowser/ProgrammableButtons

> In today's world, catchy headlines and articles often distract readers from the actual facts and relevant information.

A reasonable premise! But easier said than done. I wonder how this app counteracts the hallucination and lying behavior of LLMs.* Would be pretty bad to trade off easier-to-decipher human bias and sensationalism for distorted truths and lies from an obfuscated sequence of dot products!

* I assume they are using LLMs because they state:

> By utilizing the power of advanced AI language models capable of generating human-like text,

Ah, I've had this idea for 5+ years now and just haven't had time to try to build a MVP. Before this year it would have been harder to do well - involve human writers and sentiment analysis. But lately I have been thinking about trying to do it with GPT.

I genuinely think there is a huge underserved market for a "world's most boring news and weather site". Almost everybody I talk to on all sides of the aisle recognizes that clickbait news is one root cause of lots of problems and want an alternative. In fact, in some ways, Hacker News is that site for me.

That said, I don't get why an app not a mobile-responsive website.

I love the idea of a news summary, but this is also something of a reductio ad absurdum of "just the facts" reporting. Informative reporting would tell me what happened, who is affected, why it might matter to me, etc. Having a point of view (or a bias, if you like) is unavoidable when providing context, but providing context is essential to being informative.

It's a hard problem! But I'd guess that not many people will stick with this as their news source, because it won't hold their interest, because it doesn't include all that information about why they might want to care.

I love the idea! I was thinking about doing sth similar to my medieval content farm (https://tidings.potato.horse/about) but as a personalised feed, where I can apply different “soft” filters to different types of content, eg. remove garbage tech-bro language, provide outlines/shorter versions of sensationalised content, reference related articles from different sources. Essentially, I was thinking about replacing my poet/editorial team personas with different user personas.

What I find most ironic about this is that rather than bringing users closer to the source of information it potentially pushes them farther away by adding an additional step to verification. I imagine you've considered this? How easy does your app make it to access the source article and author information, for example?

I need an alternative YouTube homepage that generate video suggestions without clickbait titles and thumbnails.

If anyone is looking for non-sensationalist news edited by humans, I'd like to offer a shoutout to the newsletter put out by https://join1440.com/. I've been reading it now for a couple of months and, after comparing their choice of stories to cover and the ones covered in the national news (US and Germany), I'm feeling ready to leave the mainstream and let 1440 curate for me. So far they have not missed offering me an interesting and un-opinionated summary of what the mainstream outlets I've been watching consider the most important story of the day. It's a 5 minute read and is published every day except Sunday.

This is a great concept! Thanks for sharing. I do have to wonder, though, if this is a Band-Aid over the problem of sensationalist reporting. Assuming there is a market for “boring” news (I think there is; I’d like to read it!), wouldn’t it be cheaper to pay journalists to write less exaggerative pieces in the first place?

You can't just reword things and get a better result. If there actually is an alien invasion and the earth is actually doomed, that's actually the correct headline.

Media literacy is about way more than about the wording of headlines. It's also about understanding why a headline was selected, who benefits from a story, whether the story is internally logically consistent, and why were the people quoted selected, context of the story that you wouldn't know just from reading it, etc.

I say this as someone that wrote a browser plugin to do something similar in like 2011 by screening words that indicated the headline was pointless.

So basically https://www.reddit.com/r/savedyouaclick autogenerated by AI

Love the idea, the name, and the app logo. I tried it with a CNN article and found that the output was a bit too summarized. It would be nice if users could specify if they want no summarization (just desensationalize) or if they want summarization included (and possibly to what degree).

I built something that summarizes hacker news discussion pages for me, and I have been very pleasantly surprised how much nicer it is to read "angryuser1 and angryuser2 got into a heated discussion" than to actually read the discussion. Forcing everything into the neutral gpt voice has greatly reduced the emotional valence of my HN consumption

Do you generate the headline from the original headline, or do you desensationalize the body of the article and then ask OpenAI to generate a headline based off of the new article body?

It seems like the latter might be better, since it ensures the headline actually matches the article below, as opposed to relying on a likely-clickbaity title that would no longer match the desensationalized article body.

Probably worth testing both ways to see what the results look like!

I wrote a small utility to send the AP news feed to GPT and ask it to judge which stories are important based on how many people they affect and how time-sensitive they are. ie. Will this story still be important tomorrow?

Only the passing ones are then delivered to me.

I'm not releasing this as a product, it's too simple, but it works surprisingly well, and it's trivial to add criteria for what you deem to be important, or not.

I actually liked this a lot more than I thought I would. I would say I’m pretty averse to clicking on sensational titles, but that definitely leads me to not click on articles that may have contained useful information. This actually makes me comfortable reading about politics and issues that are otherwise overdramaticized and gives me the opportunity to objectively filter what I want to read.

Also check out News Minimalist! https://www.newsminimalist.com

Looks really good! Please apologize for plugging in the comments, we are doing something very similar with https://markets.sh/. The news are not only summarized and clustered by stories but we are also building a relationship of the clusters and connecting it to e.g stocks and economic data. We are also plotting news coverage over time (looking to add sentiment and metadata soon.). We made this all indexed/queriable in realtime via a chat feature So that you can follow up on questions (need to be signed up tho). API is also available for automatic retreival.

Here are some examples:

Musk Legal Issues: https://markets.sh/stories/elon-musk-s-legal-issues-2023-05-...

TikTok Ban: https://markets.sh/stories/tiktok-ban-2023-05-11-01-16-03

Bard: https://markets.sh/stories/google-bard-ai-chatbot-2023-05-11...

I'm sceptical about how good you can make low-quality source material. If you've managed to train an AI to find the little nuggets of truth that the headline is based on, that's cool. But if the topic is relevant, there will be an article from a reputable source about it.

With the current advancements, is there finally a browser extension that just hides clickbait titles/thumbnails?

There's also: https://www.newsminimalist.com/

This is the type of news app that I’ve always wanted. Kudos. I hate the sensationalism in news these days. One thing I’d like to see is a feature for grouping articles about the same piece of news. I keep seeing repeating articles covered by different outlets. It may not be easy to implement, but it’d make it much more useful for skimming the daily news.

Can’t say I‘m a regular user of Artifact, but I‘ve played around for a bit with their AI summarize feature and found it really satisfying. Very reliably tells you what‘s hiding behind clickbaity headlines and best of all, it works without having to confirm/close cookie dialogs or any other popovers first.

Edit: To give an example: Coming across the headline "Popular action series is cancelled after just one season", the summary really provides everything I want to know (or at least: to let me decide if I want to spend time actually reading the article):

> Cancelled after one season: CBS has axed action series True Lies, based on the 1994 film, after struggling to find its own identity.

> Mixed reviews and lack of audience: The show failed to gain a large enough audience despite starring actors like Steve Howey and Beverly D'Angelo.

I really like the concept and experience even though I almost missed out! I thought it was _only_ available as an app when I loaded the page on my phone. I rarely (basically never) install apps so I closed it immediately. It wasn't until I read on HN that I realized there's a web version.

I feel like the kind of person who would use Boring Report is also the kind of person who's brain is already discounting sensationalist titles and doesn't really need an app to do it for them. That being said, I'm all for trying things to make the news more measured and nuanced.

It's somewhat sad this tool is so desperately needed to make modern 'news' media less annoying and more useful. Frankly, over the past year I've intentionally blocked almost all news media out of my life by aggressively curating all my content. It was weird at first but over time I've found I'm less distracted and happier. I get more done and I'm now able to better focus on the people and things that actually matter to me.

It's ironic that this tool is essentially reverting news reporting back to what journalism is supposed to be - factually reporting notable events that have already happened. It's bizarre how acceptable it now is for 'news' to include 'opinion and speculation'.

I've been reading boringreport for few days now thanks! Here's some constructive feedback:

- The world section is super weird especially where important geopolitics are mixed in with "someone dies in a car crash in the UK".

- The web app is pretty bad for what could be much better off as a static text document. Expanding articles is unnecessary slow. Why do I have to wait 3 seconds to get 1 extra sentence and a link? Why abbreviate 3 sentences into half of a sentence at all? The full article also comes up at the bottom of the screen while locking out the rest of the app - trully weird. Honestly, it's not very usable at the current state.

Thanks for doing this. This is something I've been looking for since ChatGPT was unveiled generally. I wish Feedly or a similar RSS/News-aggregator would add a feature like this ... it would make so much sense.

I came across this gem on HN recently that targets a similar issue with news:

https://www.newsminimalist.com/

Absolute gem, have been using is everyday now

Wikipedia current events portal.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

I'd love to see an ongoing set of graphs and data visualisations that show me what's going on.

E.g.

- how much are we borrowing this year and the last 50 years

- what is net migration for the last 50 years

- what is inflation for the last 50 years

- what are the crime rates for the last 50 years

- what are the violent crime rates for the last 50 years

Don't know why I picked 50 every time, but I'd just love some key, well-contextualised data that we could all agree on. At the moment it seems as though people can't even agree on basic facts, and anything that helps with that would be awesome.

Orwell's Newspeak comes to mind. This can be a good app but it can also serve to stifle conversation by narrowing the Overton window if this kind of technique becomes the norm.

Stay vigilant.

Very nice. Although perhaps you could do well to remove some sites from your intake. For example, while the following link is mild compared to its source material, it's hardly devoid of sensationalism:

https://www.boringreport.org/app/all/645a8edbcdaefdcdfe3806b...

This is great, but I didn't realize that was a video at the top of the page; I think it needs the 'muted' attribute for it to autoplay.

Modern "news" is a lot like sewage padded by corn fructose syrup and wrapped into shiny colorful pills to fool the mind. It's true that the pills have useful elements in trace amounts, but if you start harvesting them from the pills, you'll get poisoned. Your LM just removes the deceptive shell, but the pill's contents remain the same. I think it would be better if your LM identified and highlighted lies and deceptions in news articles. Most of them will be all in red, but that's the goal: give users an idea what they are reading. For example, the prompt for your LM could be: "for every statement in this arricle, mark it in red if it's a lie or an unsubstantiated claim, mark it in purple if it's appeal to emotions, mark it in green if it's appeal to authority" and so on. I doubt journalusts will be able to outmaneuver LLM trained on every book in the internet. (journalusts to distinguish from true journalists, that are exceedingly rare today)

You can't copy and paste on desktop. That's thoroughly frustrating, it's understandable, but a more suitable mechanism should be found than strictly disabling it.

From A Random Article[0]:

"In the second case, the court ruled in favor of Louis Ciminelli, a Buffalo developer convicted for taking part in rigging the bid process and property fraud. The justices reversed a lower court ruling based on a theory of law that the government later abandoned."

That might be "boring" to the point of "uninformative." It also gives me strange reminders of the book "Brave New World," and I think most of the authors so edited might feel the same way.

I would presume to _add more_ to the article then to _take away_ from it, in some cases, to the point of blinding the reader from any fact whatsoever.

[0]: https://www.boringreport.org/app/all/645d396cf7c90670355a6c7...

From the Science section, there is a headline "Metallic Object Falls Through New Jersey Home's Roof", which is the desensationalized version of "Possible meteorite crashes through the roof of a New Jersey home, lands in bedroom still warm".

The ambiguity of "metal object" kind of makes it more sensational than "possible meteorite".

This is a pretty cool way to tackle this problem, but I don't think there's any "easy" solution to this problem space, which I visualize as:

News media needs to make money. To do so it needs eyeballs. Eyeballs, despite our best efforts and intensions, can't help but be drawn to sensation (and blood). The news media thus selects for sensation and blood.

The add-on effect of this that makes it all matter: recency bias as well as some other cognitive quirks we all have mean that when the news media selects for sensation and blood, we start to believe the universe is a lot more sensational and bloody than it really is.

This is demonstrable: publish a story about a freak one in a million train accident and people stop riding the train and start taking their cars, despite risk of accident in car being by every way of measuring it drastically higher.

I'm not saying that news media shouldn't talk about train crashes, I'm saying I'm not sure we've figured out yet how to remind people that the world is actually mundane. People watch the news to "be informed," but in actuality their perspection of reality is being warped.

The news would have you believe crime is going up or down based on whether it makes a good story, when (depending on where you live) the relatively minor adjustmens in these statistics really don't affect you, every walk to work statistically speaking will leave you unmolested.

The media would have you believe that there are riots across the country in response to the cops killing an unarmed person, again. When in reality, most protests are really quite boring, just a lot of people walking around and maybe occasionally chanting. If there even is a local protest.

I don't know what it will take to remind people that the world is boring, but right now the news media is motivated against this, because the angrier and more scared we all are, the more we click in.

Hey after I click "Desktop Android" when I am on Android, please don't show a full screen ad for an iOS app

This is the kind of app that I imagine would get popular, then it gets bought out, then the new executives would turn to each other and put a negative sign somewhere in the code turning the newly acquired app into a sensationalizer that does the opposite of its original purpose, for more engagement and corporate metrics.

Love the idea, it would be nice to have this as a chrome extension.

What exactly does "desensationalize the news" mean? Is there any additional detail on what exactly it does?

This should be useful for the ever-more-hyperbolic weather reports that dominate network news now.

NBC News, almost every week: "20 million Americans threatened by severe weather this weekend!"

"Bomb cyclone threatens 10 million people"

"Atmospheric river menacing 18 million people"

Translation: A rainy front is moving through several states.

Would be nice to be able to see a summary of the original article below the ai one, including the sensationalism

The prospect that this type of tech could proliferate is politicians' and political media's worst nightmare lol. Imagine everyone putting a boring filter on CNN, Fox News, and political Twitter. Politicians would have to run on policy platforms again, which has become almost unthinkable.

Please allow me to pay you so you can focus on this full-time.

Great execution.

Question: How do you intend to make money from/monetize this?

The reason I ask is because I have several "pet" projects like this I've been meaning to develop but with the time cost and financial cost it has to be something I can at least cover the server and maintenance costs.

"Sensationalism" is not a bug. It's an essential aspect of useful news.

Those of you who think it isn't... let me guess... You didn't major in sociology, anthropology, or psychology?

Those of you who respect sociology/anthropology/psychology and yet still think that "sensationalism" (presented in quotes because that is a socially-constructed, loaded term) is something that distracts you from real news, I'd like to hear some of your nuanced thoughts on this. Because it seems to me that one man's "sensationalizing" is another man's "helping you understand the relevance of recent events to your life." And that's quite important.

I'm not against such kind of experiments but there should be very strict legislation to label any kind of AI-generated or processed content as such. I hope that lawmakers catch up quickly enough to make this happen at least in the EU.

Well done.

There is something like this in 'A Fire Upon the Deep' by Vernor Vinge; his intergalactic societies translate their alien languages - and incompatible methods of expression - using an application similar to this one.

Very cool whenever sci-fi becomes reality!

If you take biased news sources controlled or strongly influenced by corporate/government entities X Y and Z, and de-sensationalize them, you'll still get biased sources controlled or influenced by X Y and Z. Just saying.

It would be great if it could summarize topics of bundled individual news over time. Often a single news really is part of a wider context and doesn’t make sense to be read in isolation without knowing the context before.

I believe Google News does some bundling of topics.

Though I also recognize that topics are hard to define as they could be chosen arbitrarily wide. Everything could be a topic. The ultimate topic would be “The Universe” which contains everything.

This is awesome. I have been hoping for this for a long time. It reminds me of reading a paper newspaper from the 90s. It’s all about information being shared, not clickbait. Thanks for making this!

I'd settle for an app that merely identifies all of the overwrought elements in a story and color codes them, so that we can teach people that these sources are a negative influence on their lives.

Don't rephrase it, just show me all of the sentence fragments that need to be rephrased. Or better still, make it a 'lint' tool that rates articles and websites by the density of manipulative verbiage they use.

These sites will piss you off and teach you nothing in the process.

These sites will piss you off but actually teach you something.

These sites will placate you (I'm looking at you, Ted Talks).

I’m kinda curious how this would make truly sensational news completely blasé

There's already - https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news

It's shows left, center, and right bias of new articles.

Read the 'From the center' version of articles, and the bias and sensationalism has been removed - https://www.allsides.com/story/media-industry-cnn-staffers-c...

To make it even more boring, don‘t use scrolling and instead let people swipe/leaf through the news pages. It is also easier on the eyes, if the lines of text don‘t move.

Now here is an app that ought to be held high as having real, and potentially enormous benefit to the world. (Though I wont hold my breath for any online media sources to write about it.) :-)

Add some localization to include country specific news and theme filters and I'd pay for this without hesitation. Free me from this cacophony of ever repeating "content" news.

personally i'm not interested in seeing the news rewritten by gpt as it stands. but if you could automatically find the least sensational article on the subject, and then send me to that site, along with a plugin that just highlights the most salient points, and fades the worst parts to grey, that'd be interesting.

i'd also like to see a service which shows me the news about subjects which have managed to stay in the news for at least a week. just drop all the 24-48 hour rage/hype cycles.

Another option is to watch Doordarshan - Indian national news. https://www.youtube.com/@DDIndia

Great idea! I’ll be trying this out as my news source.

One suggestion (maybe you’re already doing this), but it’s not just sensationalism but also the bias towards negative events being reported that could be addressed. “If it bleeds it leads” is a famous adage in the news world. I would love to have control over the share of negative events I see in my feed. Contrary to the popular news, the world is a far healthier and safer place than it was in the past.

I think that transformed news by language models is just another hole to jump in. I'm definitely tired of the internet being filled with mostly junk nowadays. I just don't like the idea of learning things via a language model. I prefer to filter this myself. Maybe it's more effort but to me feels more valuable. I mean we whine all the time about Google directing your searches to specific places. This feels the same of worse.

Personally speaking, I don't think I would ever use this because the media is already heavily filtered, adding a second filter won't help me personally. Its really almost impossible to know anything - you have to have boots on the ground, or go to the source. Some topics aren't even reported, and often the author doesn't understand the subject, or the author is so bias facts are omitted.

I just shared this with the Dull Men’s Club on Facebook. The share looks kind of ugly. No images. You should add Open Graph tags so that the share looks good on social media.

You can see the share here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/dullmensclub/permalink/12449...

I'm not sure that https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manches...

is well summarized by "The Christie Receives CQC Rating".

(also overriding my mouse buttons to prevent me selecting text? How very passe.)

The most watched and read US news site has not a single submission on the front page [0]

Wonder if you can make Fox News boring too.

0, https://www.forbes.com/sites/markjoyella/2023/02/01/fox-news...

A cool idea.

Question for the engineers working on this: Does this just summarize one article or at a time or cross reference multiple different sources for the same event?

Will definitely use that for my next dopamine detox cycle.

Here is a slightly more boring version of your description according to ChatGPT4:

Today, many news articles contain eye-catching titles and content that can lead readers away from the central facts. Boring Report uses OpenAI's language models to take these types of articles and changes them into the content you are reading now, with the goal of aiding readers in paying attention to the primary information.

This is surprisingly good already for an early product. I'd be willing to pay a subscription fee for something like this.

Have you considered extending it further so that instead of tackling news articles individually, it would try to find and aggregate / juxtapose everything prominent that is published about some particular news item in a similar "boring" manner?

Google weather desperately needs this whenever it reports weather from "The Sun" (awful awful "newspaper").

Today: "Brits to bask in 20C sun" (that's 68F) Yesterday: "Yellow thunderstorm warning..set to spark travel chaos"

Just a tad over the top! Genuine weather extremes in the UK are pretty rare :)

I'd be likely to use this in my daily workflow if it was a chrome extension that could simply modify headlines and article text.

I wonder how it would "desensationalize" something that probably ought to be framed more urgently than the press typically does, like the threats against democracy by creeping authoritarianism and white nationalists.

Maybe that's an another app idea: remove "both sides" and "horse race" nonsense.

Crypto is no longer cryptography but digital currencies.

AI is no longer artificial intelligence but algorithms and text generators.

You could just read the Financial Times.

Can this tech be used to make a concise version of Money Stuff by Matt Levine?

He does not need de-sensationalizing but he badly needs summarising, which seems adjacent. That Matt Levine refuses to use the services of an editor is one of the greatest tragedies of our era.

I have a feeling this is somehow going to end up becoming a hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy.

I want this on my Facebook newsfeed.

Great idea. I wish the teasers were complete sentences, not truncated. I also wish headers and teasers were complete and not click-baity. A reader should only need to click on the article for more details, not to figure out what it is about.

I like it! It would be great if the app could “bin” all articles by news topic, e.g. “Supreme Court Decision…”. Google News tries to do this. This would clean it up and make it even more “boring.” Otherwise, thank you very much!

I endorse! I think that 90% of what people respond to are the headlines, and the headlines are almost always sensationalist attempts to grab attention, and that this distorts peoples views of the world in dysfunctional ways.

Do they pay for a news feed to get the original articles to desensationalize? I’m curious about any copyright or licensing issues around using external news articles as source material for desensationalizing.

Good idea, but the desktop layout is horrible. It looks like a mobile app, with too much whitespace everywhere and not enough content. I'd like to see more than 1.5 lines of text per story.

I like this idea. Another cool idea, only for the lulz, could be to have different personas rewrite the articles, like Peter from Family Guy or Karen from Will & Grace.

Can I just have a newsletter to subscribe? Why do I need an app?

Honestly awesome, but you don’t need AI for this. Just get a script to remove all the adjectives and adverbs from an article and you’re about 80% de-sensionalized.

Reminds me a bit of https://goodnews.eu/en/

I would think that after a couple of years of COVID people would have learned that hiding from culture isn't a solution to bad culture.

Just came across Otherweb also. Was working on similar as a hobby project, more interested in back-end than front end, so cool to have on mobile.

Could you please add news.ycombinator.com to the feed?

Yes! Can you make a plug-in that reads articles and replaces headlines with the story lead (aka what the headline would have been 30 years ago)?

What a great idea!

The next step is to give each outlet a sensationalism score and then normalize their headlines according to how they usually sensationalize.

Finally, a news app for me, bravo! Minor nit: please place the date, time, and byline at the tip of articles — useful for sharing.

The very first article is a left leaning fact check.

This needs work to be what you claim. You've baked in bias and report it without emotion

Actually like this idea, but it also made me think of doing an AI app to transform all language into double-plus good Newspeak

This is a nice idea. I always wanted to start a newspaper where I just remove as many value judgements as possible

Nice work on the app! Reminds me of a news aggregator I worked on (inshapemind). What's your tech stack like?

Another great option is legiblenews which provides headlines from Wikipedia edits and is a bit dry but informative. I remember when Trump was president he was mentioned on legiblenews[1] a handful of times during his term while the mainstream media gyrated with his every move. It made me realize how little of the day to day news cycle has meaningful impact on the long term history of the world.

[1] https://legiblenews.com/

You've thrown out many subjective terms here: "catchy", "relevant", "sensationalist", "essential". How do you intend to define these and hold yourself accountable? How are you planning to keep your biases or the emergent biases of the underlying tech in check?

"just hand it to OpenAI and :shrug:" is not a responsible answer.

I would love this as a browser plugin to apply to the news sites themselves, including HN.

I don't think it makes a difference in what tone you're being lied to.

This could be used to gender articles or degender articles.

Great news - even the newspapers I enjoy sensationalise

OpenAI's training is basically the entire internet. And we know when it comes to deciding if a story really is "that bad" or if it's hyperbole, the internet is really good at giving us a clear picture on that. Police shootings? ah well he was acting funny, they had to shoot him. School shootings? so many more people die of cancer each year. Fascist / authoritarian leaders on the rise? Here's 5 subtle and pointless ways Hitler was different and therefore NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT. Global warming? The jury is still out. "Reasonable" discourse on campus being "cancelled"? OH YES CANCEL CULTURE IS RAMPANT!

Yeah, AI can totally decide what's real and what's not. Sounds great

one have to ask, if this is A) so good people want it, and B) viable, then why haven't this existed yet with the current way of writing news?

great work! Do you plan on adding some sort of a subscription model for accessing this, or will it be supported by donations all the way?

Make a plugin for YouTube click bait titles

fantastic. could you please add a way to filter out a topic/person never want to read about?

I like this idea, but I feel like the summary sometimes strips away too much context to remain useful. For example the current top story is “Fact Check: Claims Made by Former President Trump” and it includes sections like “Trump's attempts to blame then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for January 6th security failures were found to be false.”

That doesn’t tell me what he was claiming or how it was shown to be false. Whether or not someone will trust that conclusion will just depend on whether they tend to trust CNN, or their pre-existing bias on Trump/Jan 6/Pelosi.

Reading the original article his claim was that Pelosi was in charge of security as speaker of the house, and that is false because that’s the responsibility of the Capitol Police Board. I think that’d be a more useful summary of that section and a human wouldn’t have stripped away the specifics quite so much.

can I access it via boring newsletter in emails

What’s it do about news worthy content that’s not reported?

this is like honest trailers for the news

Love the idea!

What? You mean make news headlines useful?

* rapturous applause * if this works.