Discussion

• @rmac18 @rmac18 on x

  News folks are not going to love this. Some product manager announced internally a tool that FB is developing called “TL;DR”. Basically, it will use AI to summarize long form articles and spit out bullet points so people don't have to read the full piece. What could go wrong!

• @stephaniemlee Stephanie M. Lee on x

  Facebook is developing a tool to summarize articles so you don't have to read them (specifically, articles by ⁦@RMac18⁩ about Facebook's plans to undermine journalism) https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ...

• @rmac18 @rmac18 on x

  FB's TL;DR will apparently also be offering audio narration of full articles and a voice assistant to ask contextual questions about a piece. For example, you could ask “Hey Facebook, how many people will this vaccine help” and it supposedly would spit out an answer.

• @mg Matt Galligan on x

  Facebook, the “not a media company” media company, wants to now edit the news for you! Color me just a smidge skeptical. Not a day passes by where I don't want to get the band back together and fire Circa back up... https://twitter.com/...

• @audreyhasnews Audrey Cooper on x

  I feel sometimes like there is someone in FB HQ whose job is trying to come up with new ways of completely destroying any semblance of intelligence in America. https://twitter.com/...

• @dlind Dara Lind on x

  Among the MANY MANY MANY problems with this is the following: there are few widely-read “longform” articles that are read for discrete “takeaways” anyway. The exception is big investigations, which OUTLETS HAVE ALREADY STARTED AGGREGATING THEMSELVES (cf NYT on Trump taxes) https:…

• @jetjocko Adam Rogers on x

  Software engineers really solving some very specific people's very specific problems here. (Disclosure, I am a news folk, and I do not love this.) https://twitter.com/...

• @hypervisible @hypervisible on x

  Probably feeling like their goal of destroying society is not moving fast enough. https://twitter.com/...

• @maghielse Ross Maghielse on x

  If this actually ever sees the light of day, it will be hilariously short lived and give us all a solid couple months worth of screen grab jokes. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ...

• @craigawelch Craig Welch on x

  Waiting for Facebook to build a tool that showers news producers with the $ necessary to inform the citizenry. It would compensate content producers for the money it makes selling ads when people share news. You could call it: Facebook. https://twitter.com/...

• @briannawu Brianna Wu on x

  Good news everyone! Now instead of people getting news from journalists, they will get it from Facebook's AI which will summarize the journalists. This is going to work out AMAZINGLY well! https://twitter.com/...

• @mslopatto Elizabeth Lopatto on x

  I can't wait to see if AI can parse my tone https://twitter.com/...

• @walldo Brandon Wall on x

  This sounds exactly like the community reddit bot that has been around for years https://twitter.com/...

• @anthropunk Dr. S.A. Applin on x

  Facebook seems determined to become a propaganda machine. Whether it is for external actors, or FB itself, this is a bad idea. What is too long and we should not be reading, is *anything* on Facebook. https://twitter.com/...

• @buzzfeednews @buzzfeednews on x

  Facebook told employees tonight that it's developing a tool to make TLDRs of news articles so users won't have to read them that also provides audio narration. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ...

• @rmac18 @rmac18 on x

  CTO Schroepfer commends the company's AI technology. He talks of a principle called “self-supervision” or a way for AI to train itself to detect hate speech and misinfo. As a reminder, here's one departing Facebook employee said about AI last week. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ .…

• @heyheyesj Eric Johnson on x

  Your regular reminder that Facebook has too much money & staff and is just throwing resources at unnecessary products. This is inevitably going to do more harm than good and sow further distrust in actual journalism. https://twitter.com/...

• @kevinroose Kevin Roose on x

  It's been less than a year since Facebook's AI accidentally translated Xi Jinping's name as “Mr. Shithole,” so I'm gonna take the under on this one ever shipping. https://twitter.com/...

• @vogon @vogon on x

  developing a state-of-the-art AI summarization system (nb: “state-of-the-art” for text summarization right now is apparently about 30-40% word overlap with a reference summary) sounds both way cheaper and way more effective than the small team of human workers who used to do this…

• @number5 Bruce Wang on x

  TLDR sounds like a useful tool, but when it's done by Facebook you need to think twice. https://twitter.com/...

• @fwd @fwd on x

  “We all get the privilege of seeing the future because we are making it.” https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ...

• @mccarthyryanj Ryan McCarthy on x

  Or, I don't know, maybe hire more moderators? https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ...

• @inafried Ina Fried on x

  @RMac18 Can I get just an automated summary?

• @charles_gaba @charles_gaba on x

  I believe this is called “Twitter”. https://twitter.com/...

• @joshconstine Josh Constine -SignalFire on x

  Facebook is building AI news summarization software, which could help it build a clone of ByteDance's TikTok predecessor: rapid-fire newsreader app Toutiao https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ...

• @_richardhall Richard Hall on x

  If there's one thing Facebook has too much of, it's nuance. https://twitter.com/...

• @brooklynmarie Brooke Binkowski on x

  Scooping up money generated by journalism, squeezing out specific news orgs with algorithms, doling out small payouts to newsrooms that are just large enough to keep everyone scared of pissing them off, and now using AI to steal our shit? @Facebook is no friend to #1A! https://tw…

• @shortformernie Ernie Smith on x

  Marissa Mayer once paid a 16-year-old millions of dollars for this very thing when she was at Yahoo. https://twitter.com/...

• @kevin_church Kevin Church on x

  This is the worst idea that this terrible company has come up with, and that's saying a lot. https://twitter.com/...

• @sciliz @sciliz on x

  I mean, I can tell a certain segment of academic citations came from people who just read the abstract so this doesn't seem so novel awful https://twitter.com/...

• @bendreyfuss Ben Dreyfuss on x

  I imagine Facebook will fuck this up but in theory isn't this just a bit like Google's answers to when the super bowl is? And stuff? https://twitter.com/...

• @kenlymcg Caitlin McGrane on x

  Wowee this sounds like a truly bonkers and nightmarish idea that will definitely increase online harassment of women journalists when the AI inevitably misunderstands an article/argument @withMEAA @genderequityvic https://twitter.com/...

• @rands @rands on x

  What a terrifically bad idea: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ...