> We will be filtering our browsers with LLMs to remove junk and override Google, Twitter and FB
I cannot wait for the day where I can create a list of blocked terms "Musk, Trump, American politics, ..." and have an intelligent LLM filter so that it doesn't matter what site I visit, whether The Verge, or The Guardian, or Reddit, all articles or posts related to these terms will be gone.
I think this has a chance to have a far higher effect than just ad tech. It's going to effect all media publishers. But I also expect them, led by Google and Facebook, to fight this tooth and nail with every dirty trick they can.
Great start. Please develop a plugin I can secretly add to my Mother's browser to dial down the outrage she reads on the fly! She'll notice 'redacted' ;)
The main issue is that its very slow and expensive to browse the internet like this. The LLM will only perform well if you have it do chain of thought reasoning, and that has a latency hit because of a longer generation.
This is very interesting desire to me.. Wont you end up with a weird, contrived context for everything else you do read though? Like you would be reading an article about the UN and it would say: "and then, some country put forward a new resolution." Wouldn't that, like, kinda drive you crazy?
Like I know the state of journalism is less than stellar, but patching it after the fact for each reader seems like the wrong direction. The implicit conception of "the news" in this desire reifies it into a weird kind of commodity for your personal entertainment/edification; which is precisely the conception operating today which makes it so bad!
Like, maybe, if you have psychological considerations where certain triggers are very damaging, I can kinda understand this. But if that is really the case, then just why read the news anyway? Of course you gotta read some sometimes, but in general you can read other things. There is a lifetime and a half of fiction and nonfiction to read, no GPU required!
I don't want to remove all mentions. If I'm reading an article about something else and it happens to mention something on my list, that's fine. I just want to remove all the top level articles and posts about these things.
It's not about being triggered by anything or trying to hide from anything. I also don't need (or even want) 100% efficacy. It's about cleaning up noise. For example, at this point I'm fully aware that Musk has turned Twitter into even more of a cesspool. I don't need any more information about that. And yet I get it, all the latest "juicy Musk gossip" any time I go near any tech sites. And it's just noise to me at this point.
Same with American politics. I'm not from the US so I'd be happy with a short monthly synopsis on what's happening there. But on the English speaking web, American politics is everywhere. It's exhausting. I want to filter it, reclaim the attention it steals from me while still being engaged with online society to a degree that I choose. And I believe that reclaiming this attention, energy, and time would allow me to engage more with subjects I do care about.
I see, that totally makes sense, but in that case it doesn't seem like you need a fancy AI for this, or at least it feels way overkill for what you actually want here.
patching it after the fact is definitely needed. same way I use a plugin to filter out curse words because when it comes to your brain, garbage in = garbage out. patching "news" stories after the fact will never be perfect though because half the problem with "journalism" is omission of facts, not just biased half-truths or opinions.
Explains why Google tried (or is trying) so hard to push WEI though. If they can't programmatically evade adblockers, might as well programmatically prevent them.
I do use a feed reader already but it's not good for discovering new things. The problem is when I venture out to discover what's going on in the world I'm deluged with Musk spam. A couple of years ago it was Trump spam.
Agreed. I use
- A feed reader with multiple sources
- On X, I started by muting words and accounts. I now only watch one highly curated list
- Here
- podcasts
- Engaging with relevant people directly
I'm sometimes a bit late on new trends, but I spend more time on long forms and reinforce a meaningful network in the process.
We started work on an open-source LLM-powered media filter at OpenLocus (https://github.com/openlocus), aiming for an alpha release by late 2023.
In the more medium term we are collaborating on improving information overload, filter bubbles & misinformation with labs at AllenAI, CMU, UPenn & Utah.
Contributions and feedback are welcome! Feel free to hit me up for an early access - email in the profile.
I cannot wait for the day where I can create a list of blocked terms "Musk, Trump, American politics, ..." and have an intelligent LLM filter so that it doesn't matter what site I visit, whether The Verge, or The Guardian, or Reddit, all articles or posts related to these terms will be gone.
I think this has a chance to have a far higher effect than just ad tech. It's going to effect all media publishers. But I also expect them, led by Google and Facebook, to fight this tooth and nail with every dirty trick they can.