Summarizing Books with Human Feedback

https://openai.com/blog/summarizing-books/

by atg_abhishek • 5 years ago

88 19 5 years ago

Leaving aside weapon and security purposes, full-length book summary strikes me as especially dystopian.

In truth, I think this is something AI is capable of doing, but are we really comfortable in passing information through an interface where we cannot even know what is lost.

This topic begs so many questions that I guess are not unique to this problem. Who is all of this intelligence for, though?

What if we forget how to write well?

DennisP• 5 years ago

It's not like summaries have to entirely replace whole books.

Personally I have a library on my kindle that's too much for me to read in full, considering I'm constantly adding to it. I read a lot of books but good summaries strike me as an improvement for the cases where I either never get to a book, or just read its first several chapters.

For the books I do fully read, summaries could make for nice reviews. With some further development, it seems this technology could turn the summaries into quiz questions, which would really help lock in long-term learning.

DiggyJohnson2• 5 years ago

Oh I'm not dissing this particular endeavour or anything-I more meant to point out that I was surprised by my own initial reaction was so negative. There are certainly uses for summaries, and by no means does a summary replace the existence of the original text.

abc_lisper2• 5 years ago

This can’t come fast enough. Could be used to filter out pervasive false hoods spewed on social media

falcor84• 5 years ago

How? What's to stop the AI (and/or humans in the loop) from spreading falsehoods?

abc_lisper2• 5 years ago

Other AIs. Because we can summarize well, we would be able to filter out extraneous data and figure out the actual intent better.

rcMgD2BwE72F• 5 years ago

People desire alternative stories because they distrust those who are telling the main story, not because they lack good text or tools.

You'll be providing with the right AI-written story, but they'll still go read something else -- unless you can convince them that you're on their side (not with stories but actual-life-changing stuff). But we're not working on that and prefer toying with tools and algos.

TOMDM• 5 years ago

People aren't spewing falsehoods for a lack of people pointing out the truth, they do so in spite of the truth presented to them.

herbertl• 5 years ago

This is particularly relevant to yesterday's discussion on books that are too long: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28636074

djoldman2• 5 years ago

Paper:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.10862.pdf

djoldman2• 5 years ago

Example ("The Great Gatsby"):

The narrator, a Yale graduate, moves to New York to learn the bond business. He meets Gatsby, a man from a wealthy Midwest family who attended Oxford. Gatsby invites the narrator to lunch and shows him his war medals.

Gatsby wants Daisy to tell Tom she never loved him and wants to go back to Louisville to get married as they had planned 5 years ago.

Mrs. Wilson is killed by a car that doesn't stop. Gatsby says he tried to stop Daisy from driving, but she couldn't, so he pulled on the emergency brake.

After two years, Nick remembers the police and photographers at Gatsby's house after his death.

On the last night, Nick looks at Gatsby's house one last time.

timgilbert• 5 years ago

That's... kind of a rubbish summary, but I'm not sure what I'd want a ~700-word summary of The Great Gatsby to look like.

LeonardoTolstoy• 5 years ago

Honestly, I think you could do worse than the Wikipedia summary. That is maybe a bit too long (I can't remember the Wikipedia guidelines for books) it looks longer than 700 words. But from there I think you could fashion a solid 700 word summary of the book without too much trouble.

tschwimmer• 5 years ago

This is truly an awful summary. It is factually correct but completely misses any nuance or description of themes that make The Great Gatsby a notable work.

I doubt this has any value for what is considered to be literature, and probably isn't very useful for most of the rest of fiction either. I'd be curious to see this be used on dense non-fiction to extract the salient points (I'm imagining this being run on Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century), but based on this sample I'm not optimistic.

mercurialsolo• 5 years ago

A bunch of similar summaries around movies which have been doing the round at YouTube.

I wonder what the purpose of such summaries is - is it to define the plot section ala Wikipedia movie plots or IMDB plots or is it for really condensing knowledge into abstracts.

The latter does require a certain degree of both cognition around the domain as well creative writing to make it engaging.

Causality1• 5 years ago

It would be great if this works well. I've noticed it's something that doesn't really exist. If a book is extremely popular it might have a good plot summary on Wikipedia but if not all you're going to get is one or two teaser paragraphs.

I often find myself wanting to continue a series that I didn't finish or just had a book come out without rereading all the previous ones. Having a big compendium of five-page plot summaries would be incredible.

dloss• 5 years ago

Good. Now summarize Wikipedia.

beckman466• 5 years ago

Why don't we instead give all humans full universal access to all knowledge, science and technology, instead of feeding books into black box 'AI' for 'summaries'?

Why should an 'AI' have universal access to this material, and not the working class? Especially the working class in the global south. They are so far from universal access. It's only a matter of time before the capitalist academia comes down on emancipatory initiatives/projects (yet capital disrupting), like Sci-Hub.

I write 'AI' because i see the pursuit of a general artificial intelligence in the labs of the propertied class (on their own profit-seeking, commons-hostile terms), despite the fact that there is widespread suffering caused by today's global production system, as a disgusting joke.

The supposed inevitability of today's widespread suffering across the world is a false truth pulled over our eyes by the propertied class.

World peace and full equality in this new digital age is a matter of priorities.

Summarizing Books with Human Feedback

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