Show HN: Boring Report, a news app that uses AI to desensationalize the news

[aquaVitae]

In today's world, catchy headlines and articles often distract readers from the facts and relevant information. By utilizing OpenAI's language models, Boring Report processes sensationalist news articles, transforms them into the content you see, and helps readers focus on the essential details. We recently updated our iOS app experience, so any and all feedback would be appreciated.

App Link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/boring-report-news-by-ai/id644...

[morsch]

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...

[vaskal08]

Hey, other dev on this project. This is a good catch, and we're aware of this issue. What it's doing is actually using a photo caption as part of the article, and we're working on removing the use of that in the summarization process.

[madeofpalk]

I've come around to there being legitimate usecases for this type of generative AI, but I don't think producing anything that's supposed to be "True" or "Correct" is one. I think the only useful usecases is for when you want to generate fiction.

[jjeaff]

In fairness to the AI, I have often been confused by stock images or old images on news articles that are not from the event in question.

[mensetmanusman]

I base all my stock picks on the logos used.

[chankstein38]

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!

[gnicholas]

I think the issue here is that we've been fed a high-sensationalism diet, so our brains are acclimated to in-your-face headlines. Perhaps if we detoxed our brains a bit (by using this app exclusively for a week or two), we would be able to recalibrate our expectations for what seems "interesting".

This is sort of like how you recalibrate your tongue to a low-salt diet if you stop eating salty food for a few weeks.

[harryvederci]

> This just brings reality to the forefront and makes me realize I don't care about the news

Maybe the pre-clickbait era version of you would have found more of these articles interesting? So maybe it's not that you don't care about the news, but your "base level" of what's interesting is different due to being used to clickbait.

[nomilk]

> 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

That's a feature, not a bug. The 'news' is 90% useless, if not descrutive, information. Ask yourself: what percentage of the news is optimal to maintain your worldly wisdom? I'd guess about 1%. So getting it down to 10% is half way there, on a logarithmic scale.

[Clubber]

Yes, this has a lot of potential. If the news orgs won't de-sensationalize because of incentives, we can do it for them. It would be a great browser plugin, and you can define the URL's you want to de-sensationalize.

[chiefalchemist]

> Half of the "news" we're fed is sensationalized

Half? It's higher than that.

The other issue is - and your quoted "news" hints at it - a significant amount of what we're fed isn't news at all. Yes, it's something that happened. That doesn't make it news.

So while this app might remove the hyperbole what about the things and details that are being ignored? How do we fill the gaps so we're getting a more complete context?

[lizardking]

I’m not sure that’s a flaw

[searchableguy]

> 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 tried doing the same thing as OP with chatgpt and came to the same realization so I stopped.

[shrimpx]

Maybe it could also use the LLM to rank the articles by essential importance or impact.

[lysecret]

Maybe we need a recommendation on top of the boringfied version to find the truly interesting stuff for you.

[rTX5CMRXIfFG]

This is why I am just as skeptical of criticism of the media.

Everyone wants to consume their work, but they need people to pay for it so that they can keep working, but people won’t consume their work unless it’s sensational.

[tikkun]

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.

[torresmo]

I am looking forward to a tool to summarize a 10 page long Terms of Service into a list of points about what I really need to beware of. Same for legal contracts.

[tikkun]

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35256007

[aledalgrande]

My favorite is pasting something into the chat with "ELI5"

[hooande]

What you described is known as "sequence-to-sequence learning", or seq2seq. Google it or ask ChatGPT. It's a very common NLP technique that can do almost everything you mentioned.

Of course the utility will depend on the training data you collect. For example to go from corporate speak -> english you would need thousands of pairs of "translated" sentences. Or you could use an LLM to translate for you, paying as you go

[nico]

The same concept applies to so many things

One time, local-dialect subtitles completely changed a movie experience for me

It was an American movie. Where I was, they usually watch movies with english audio and neutral Spanish subtitles

This time, instead of neutral Spanish, they used local Spanish with slang… wow, what a difference in the way the movie felt

Having local language and slang can convey meaning and emotions so much more effectively

[jebarker]

Another use case in the arts: interpreting literature and finding connections within and between books

[dontupvoteme]

you are missing "rewrite email i don't want to read in the style of <author i like> influenced by <other thing i like>"

[calibas]

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.

[skeaker]

Disagree. If you understand that the switch hardware is very limiting, you understand that the game runs despite that, and you understand the usage of hyperbole to emphasize how bad the switch hardware is for 2023, the original title should make perfect sense. It's also more informative on what the article will contain since you can infer that it will specifically talk about the hardware and its limitations, whereas the shortened title makes it sound like a plain benchmark.

[zowie_vd]

Ideally it would put the conclusions in the title:

> The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom performance: 20 to 30 FPS on Nintendo Switch

That would generally make it unnecessary to read the article.

[gumballindie]

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!

[082349872349872]

In the old days, I am told, BBC newsreaders read the news, and on days when not enough had happened, proceeded to play music for the remainder of their timeslot.

[teawrecks]

That's like saying, in an ideal world we don't need encryption because no one lies, everyone is responsible with the data they are entrusted with, and no one has any motives to look at data that doesn't belong to them. Ok, but we don't live in that world. So we have encryption, and people have to take what they hear with a grain of salt.

[dudeinjapan]

We should do the same with fiction novels. For example:

In 1922, a man named Nick Carraway moved to West Egg, Long Island, a region populated by newly rich individuals who have established social connections. Nick has taken residence in a small house next door to a mansion owned by a man named Jay Gatsby.

[powersnail]

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.

[parpfish]

A related idea that I’ve had is to present a time-lagged newsfeed and use AI to link to any follow up stories.

“hey, remember how everyone was panicking about the price of eggs a few months ago? Well, prices are normal now but only one person wrote about it so you probably didn’t hear that”

[TySchultz]

I had nearly the same idea as you around surfacing what is "important" vs just a large list of RSS articles.

The main differences compared to what you are thinking are two things. One for the `Significance of the event` I've used the number of publishers talking about that event. So more publishers == more important. Two, I've done this in a daily fashion instead of a weekly report.

I can also confirm that the LM has the capability to do at least a days worth (2500+) of articles. I would doubt its capability to produce an entire article but it does a great job at a small summary.

Here is the link if you wanted to check it out. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/quill-news-digest/id1669557131

[mrguyorama]

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.

[krapp]

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

Why?

What are you going to do?

Just get high off the dopamine drip fed by social media rage cycles? Angry rants on Twitter? Maybe start a Youtube channel and make a buck or two with banal political essays?

Recognize that the news is designed to make you angry because that anger prevents you from taking any form of effective action, it misdirects your energy and consumes your focus. It is a means of control, leading you to confuse catharsis with praxis.

By all means, be concerned about the world, injustice, social inequality, etc. There is a lot to be concerned about. But anger - much less the indignant virtue signaling anger you're displaying here, is a waste of time.

[skaushik92]

I agree that having an emotional response can help trigger societal change but it’s important to distinguish emotion that comes from within you after seeing information and you being fed content that is intentionally emotionally triggering. I agree that injustice shouldn’t be ignored but letting people think and feel it for themselves can be more powerful and impactful long term than being force-fed what to feel, which can result in people not fully realizing what they’re supporting and also moving on to the next thing that comes up.

[seizethecheese]

People getting angry at news is a major reason for a lot of the news that is worth getting angry at.

[thenoblesunfish]

That sounds nice, but the problem is that 99.99% of people get angry and then .. do little. At best they complain to their friends and raise awareness. Mostly they just feel stressed. The point is that the bottleneck is not awareness or even justifiable rage, it's intelligent action, and a more staid view of current events sounds attractive.

[asoneth]

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.

[freediver]

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

[hgsgm]

"Unbias" doesn't exist.

[malcolmgreaves]

> 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,

[micromacrofoot]

Usually it hallucinates when you're asking for information, in this case it's rewriting existing text, so it should be a little safer. When in doubt check another source, as with everything.

[a13o]

I think there will be an art to these "information summarization" products. You want just enough summarization to accomplish the reader's goal, while also minimizing your hallucination surface area. Summarize too short, and your user won't get what they came for. Summarize too long, and watch user trust crater as the hallucinations pile up.

I don't think there's a generalized solution to this problem for all information domains, so when search engine companies implement it it'll be low quality. What remains to be seen is if the money is in being a curator/aggregator within a niche, as Boring Report aims to be; or if it will be in selling the specialized summarization tech to the content creators directly - for use by them when they publish. I think the latter leans B2B and will have higher quality since the content creator signs off on it. But we'll see. Either way, the right mental model for LLMs may be to treat them as memetic compression algorithms.

[shireboy]

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.

[heleninboodler]

Agree strongly with the "why is this an app?" stance. The front page makes it unclear that there's a web interface at all because your options are big buttons for ios and for "desktop/android". No, I definitely don't want a "desktop" app. I want a web page. So I didn't click it and I closed the window.

When considering installing any app, your first question should be "is there any benefit to the user of making this an app instead of a web page?" The answer is very frequently no, which means effort spent building the app and getting me to install it must be for a purpose that's not in my interests, such as tracking.

[georgeg23]

It does have a mobile web version:

https://www.boringreport.org/app

[rswerve]

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.

[rpastuszak]

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.

[ghostbrainalpha]

Dude, I love your Medieval Content Farm!!!

[CSSer]

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?

[aquaVitae]

We readily make available the source article on both iOS app and website. We want to serve as the stepping stone for information about an event that would encourage people to seek out more.

[beardyw]

Looks like the original URL is at the top of every story.

[ConfusedDog]

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

[crazygringo]

For thumbnails, ask and ye shall receive -- Clickbait Remover for Youtube:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clickbait-remover-...

Further discussion on HN:

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+...

[sureglymop]

I use Procrastination Free YouTube. It has settings to customize YouTube so that you don't see any suggestions at all. If i need to watch a video, I have to search for it. In order to not miss Videos from people i want to follow, I use NewPipe on my phone.

[SomewhatLikely]

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-videos-sum...

[jeremyjh]

But how will you know what to click on without a goofy face with a shocked expression?

[George83728]

Use BlockTube to block any channel that uses clickbait thumbnails. That's what I do. I don't care if "but their content is calm and good", if they use clickbait thumbnails they lose all views from me forever. There's no shortage of channels on youtube that don't do that, so there's no reason to tolerate the ones who do.

[ncarroll]

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.

[eaurouge]

I agree. I downloaded the Boring app yesterday. Launched it for the first time today and it appears to be tackling the wrong problem. The problem isn’t the headlines, it’s deciding what to cover in the first place.

PBS News Hour also does a great job of this. Just a few global and national stories a day, but a stark contrast from the emotional triggers from other news outlets.

Unfortunately have to delete the app for now. Will check back later to see if they’ve figured it out.

[pohl]

Sounds interesting. Just out of curiosity, how would they cover something like the recent "town hall" that CNN hosted for DJT?

[lumb63]

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?

[woile]

In an ideal world yes, but the incentives are not there. For example, many governments benefit from media being sensationalist, within and outside borders. They don't want less sensationalism. I think this "attention to negativity" is something inherent to humans, and now that we have opened the door, I doubt it's gonna close by everyone paying more to journalists.

[dclowd9901]

I would posit the minority of people are drawn to more "boringly" presented news, and as such, it wouldn't make much sense to have it be the primary artifact. (for better or worse)

[notduncansmith]

I think counteracting the market forces that drive exaggerated journalism would be far more expensive and difficult than simply developing some software to filter the exaggerations locally. Also, we can work on the first more effectively with the second in hand.

[carabiner]

Try ft.com. Most of their revenue comes from subscriptions, not ads, so they are not striving to generate clickbait like most papers.

[solarkraft]

There are boring news orgs, but how many are you subscribed to? How likely are others to find them?

[mkoubaa]

If there is a x million dollar market for boring news, there's an x+a million dollar market for the same news that's less boring

[tehjoker]

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.

[pdabbadabba]

I agree. Although one side effect of the Boring Report's approach that I quite like is that it also seems to make the headlines more informative.

[DesiLurker]

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

[gnicholas]

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).

[kmod]

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

[gnicholas]

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!

[rkangel]

Also, in a couple of cases the desensationalising has removed (useful) information. E.g. in https://www.boringreport.org/app/all/645d396cf7c90670355a6c7... the headline is "Supreme Court Decisions in Two Cases" missing any of the stuff about corruption in the original headline "Supreme Court sides with ex-Cuomo aide and Buffalo developer in disputes over corruption convictions".

(also, that click jacking to prevent copy/paste is a PITA)

[LeoPanthera]

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.

[kritr]

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.

[billythemaker]

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

[halotrope]

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...

[solarkraft]

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?

[JALTU]

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

[RobinL]

I would love to see a combination of the two: stories ranked by importance with boring headlines

[kjreact]

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.

[tethys]

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.

[ademup]

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.

[oatmeal1]

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.

[nsilvestri]

I disagree, as I think this would be useful to people with anxiety disorders who don't want to entirely disconnect from the news. Just because they may be able to logically identify articles and headlines as "sensationalist" doesn't mean their brain won't still kick off some uncomfortable physiological responses.

[mrandish]

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'.

[wraptile]

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.

[xtracto]

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.

[aquaVitae]

We plan to implement RSS support as well, so please stay tuned. Thanks for the support.

[absoluteunit1]

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

[usgroup]

Wikipedia current events portal.

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

[philipwhiuk]

Generally about a week out of date.

[robertlagrant]

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.

[erehweb]

Agree that this would be interesting, but your proposed solution would not address people not agreeing on facts, I think. People often (many on this site) say that they don't believe government inflation figures, or that underreporting of crime makes crime rates meaningless.

[uoaei]

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.

[austinjp]

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...

[mgcross]

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.

[vaskal08]

Hey, dev on this project, thanks for the heads up! Fix should be there soon.

[akomtu]

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)

[DesiLurker]

though thats true this product (if widely used) would reduce incentives to make clickbaity headlines like 'You Wont Believe' or 'Watch what happens when'. Also 5000 word essay at the start of every boiled potato recipe. Thats a step forward but to change the actual content of news would require adjustment of journalistic motivations, which are primarily either money or power driven. they dont change easy especially given how much money is in keeping populus close to 50/50 on only 2 options.

[akira2501]

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...

[ryanblakeley]

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".

[komali2]

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.

[hgsgm]

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

[wkat4242]

Yeah especially when they can detect I'm not even on iOS in the first place.

[ftxbro]

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.

[thethimble]

We need a similar app that removes existentially cynical themes from HN comments

[miguelbemartin]

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

[dubcanada]

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

[yamazakiwi]

What exactly does "What exactly does "desensationalize the news" mean?" mean?

I think what you're really saying is: "I'm less interested in the work this person did to make something cool; selfishly, I'd like to know if it follows my biases so I can judge it based on politics."

Or you're just curious how it works and haven't spent the effort trying it out, which is valid.

[ShadowBanThis01]

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.

[pixl97]

I mean there is a different between 'getting some rain this weekend' and 'life threatening flooding'.

The atmospheric river post would be an example of the second headline and should still maintain the necessary urgency and implied danger.

[thyselius]

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

[shrimpx]

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.

[nomel]

With the "by omissions" dishonesty that most politicized news orgs go with these days, I think gathering all news, then putting it through the AI, would be ideal. There would be some chance at getting the whole picture.

I'm far more interested in what a sensational news org decided to not include.

[phs]

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

[kennethologist]

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.

[clnq]

I would like to pay for a news aggregator like this, especially if it had more topics. $1 a month would be easy to part with and would cover GPT costs quickly with a relatively small number of users.

I would also like to see an RSS reader that does the same to my own feeds, but that could be cost-prohibitive.

[satisfice]

"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.

[whythre]

Seems to me it’s just a hyperbolic arms race in a pretty naked attempt to generate clicks at all costs. I am quite content to figure out how the news effects me without breathless editorializing in the title.

[KoftaBob]

What would be an example of a headline that you think people would label Sensationalist but that you would describe as "helping you understand the relevance of recent events to your life." ?

[jonathanstrange]

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.

[Fatboyrunning]

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!

[einpoklum]

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.

[kasdi]

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.

[bobx11]

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!

[hinkley]

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).

[teeray]

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

[rs999gti]

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...

[andrewxdiamond]

Isn’t coming to a news story from these specific political viewpoints already a whole lot of bias?

I don’t think we can boil down most things into three separate POV. Not everything needs to be looked at through a political party’s perspective

[dragonwriter]

Center bias is as much of a bias as any other.

[amai]

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.

[taylorius]

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.) :-)

[mxmbrb]

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.

[aquaVitae]

Localization and further customization is on our list of priorities, so say tuned. Thank you for your interest!

[sigstoat]

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.

[sreeramvenkat]

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

[potamic]

Wouldn't recommend at all. Journalist bodies have been warning about the compromisation of Doordarshan by the government. They have stopped subscribing to the Press Trust of India, which is a highly reputed Reuters like agency, in favour of an RSS aligned, government friendly agency.

https://thewire.in/media/naj-duj-hindusthan-samachar-prasar-...

[renjimen]

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.

[george_sp]

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.

[justinzollars]

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.

[AuthorizedCust]

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...

[philipwhiuk]

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.)

[unpopularopp]

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...

[jeremy_wiebe]

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?

[chaoz_]

Will definitely use that for my next dopamine detox cycle.

[ada1981]

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.

[int_19h]

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?

[abridgett]

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 :)

[reso]

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.

[pohl]

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.

[nailer]

I suspect you might participate in the sensationalism the app was built the prevent. Outside the prison system, white nationalists hold very little influence in the US.

[comrad]

Crypto is no longer cryptography but digital currencies.

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

[hackernewds]

that's a glorious way of saying "UIs with outputs from static prompts to GPT"

[carabiner]

You could just read the Financial Times.

[meltedcapacitor]

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.

[eternalban]

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

[amelius]

I want this on my Facebook newsfeed.

[barracuda6544]

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.

[jschveibinz]

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!

[jonnycomputer]

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.

[remote_phone]

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.

[CursedUrn]

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.

[aledalgrande]

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.

[lxe]

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

[SamuelAdams]

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.

[amai]

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

[RNCTX]

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.

[methods21]

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.

[gregman1]

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

[zorak8me]

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)?

[gerash]

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.

[shazeubaa]

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

[svenjr]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0Justt93iU

[upsidesinclude]

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

[int_19h]

What is the problem with the summarization of that article, exactly?

https://www.boringreport.org/app/all/645c525a001a7a3765dbc4c...

Or are you complaining that it's there at all?

[jonnycomputer]

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

[guerrilla]

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

[sha16]

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

[tppiotrowski]

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/

[perrygeo]

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.

[lordswork]

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

[AnonCoward42]

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

[int_19h]

It does. You're much more likely to spot a lie that does not try to push your emotional buttons before delivering the falsehoods.

[number6]

This could be used to gender articles or degender articles.

[Pete-Codes]

Great news - even the newspapers I enjoy sensationalise

[zzzeek]

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

[bdishdodhj]

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?

[elSidCampeador]

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?

[eBombzor]

Make a plugin for YouTube click bait titles

[baran1]

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

[mcintyre1994]

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.

[synergy20]

can I access it via boring newsletter in emails

[0x445442]

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

[roycebranning]

this is like honest trailers for the news

[koinedad]

Love the idea!

[loeg]

> Most of us have a sense that modern day journalists are extremely anti-white and anti-asian

Most of who?

[haldujai]

A black-box LLM which is probably inherently biased from its training data ascribing racist labels to individual humans and ranking them sounds like a horrendous idea you’d read about in an Orwell novel.

Do you have any evidence suggesting modern day journalists are extremely anti-white and anti-Asian? That’s an incredibly bold statement to make.

[LightBug1]

What? You mean make news headlines useful?

* rapturous applause * if this works.