Articles, knowledge and summaries
How does the news world work?
There are plenty news apps and portals that provides you with titles and intro to the article. Which one to click? And why do they care what do we click? One click is one (to probably a couple of) advertisements shown. Each shown advertisement is money. Therefore more clicks is more profit (and popularity which ends up in the profit too).
How to force readers to enter that certain article and not the others? It’s clickbait. There is a video made by Veritasium (which I strongly recommend) taking clickbait apart and explaining it. I found that clickbait drives people to find answer but not to understand the answer. Great example can be found on social media with links to clickbait articles. Very first comment beneath this link is revealing the answer for the clickbait’s question or thrill. This satisfies our
The value
Sadly, a lot of clickbait articles are low quality: “Doom tax is coming, prepare for the worst!” which means that 20 people will pay 10$ more per annum. You statistically won’t be in that 20 people grup, but who cares? You clicked the link!
I think that this developed in us a need of chasing the answer rather than a need of knowledge (which is not always only the answer). Without understanding of the topic, fact checks and referrals to the article, author based on, we can’t uncover fake news. Even if the article is true, it usually may lack the wider context or other sights on the topic.
I’m subscribing to some newsletters with a lot of good content, but there are always something that is stopping me from reading as much as I’m interested in. It can either be lack of time, or a length of an article (length to interestingness ratio). Finally I ended up with a tone of unread articles with some of them on my bucket list that I’ll probably never read. I searched for browser extensions that will help me to summarise an article, but none met my expectations. Until…
AI for help
Despite artificial inteligence is with us for a long time, very long time (since 1957), the AI boom happened quite recently when LLMs (such as chat GPT) got much more popular. It’s used almost everywhere, regardless if it’s needed or not. It’s a new buzzword everyone want in their offer. I’d like to focus on one small think related with LLMs that’s currently in my mind.
I’m used to missing hypes and starting to interest about hyped things months after they went viral. Arc browser was not an exception. After months after hearing about it, I finally decided to check it out. It’s great (but not perfect), especially two of it’s features: “5-second previews” and “ask on page”.
Ask on page is a feature that allows us to ask questions about the page’s content. The great thing is that we get not only the answer but also the quote of the article that is related to our question. But that’s not the end. We can ask for article summarisation, listing key points of the article and ask of the specific question.
The second one allows us to hover the cursor above a link to display a small tooltip with a page summary.
Is it all good?
That’s all helpful, it speeds up our lives, but is it always healthy? It depends: if we’re looking for an answer, doing some research then it’s great, because it assists us in what we do, but we’re holding the knowledge and the reasoning and AI is helping us with the arguments.
When we’re new in the topic, it’s all the way around. It works similarly to the clickbait articles. Even with the valuable content summaries usually strips it to the simple answer, where context and reasoning is lost. It’s better than nothing, but I wouldn’t say it’s a good way to go.
Based on the Veritasium video I linked earlier, even good creators have to use clickbait, they spend days or even months to produce a high quality content with deep insight into the topic. Combining clickbait and summarisation we end up with a result that we can’t explain. That’s lame even in small taks.
I won’t stop using these Arc features, these are very helpful, but I want to use them when they save time without cutting the value, and I recommend everyone to slow down and choose to understand instead to know.