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imiric parent
I'm firmly on the side of "AI" skepticism, but even I have to admit that this is a very good use of the tech. LLMs generally do a great job at summarizing text, which is essentially what this is. The sources could be statically defined in advance, given that they know where they pull the information from, so I don't think the LLM generates that content.

So if this automates the process of fetching the top news from a static list of news sites and summarizing the content in a specific structure, there's not much that can go wrong there. There's a very small chance that the LLM would hallucinate when asked to summarize a relatively short amount of text.

input_sh
It's useful for the users, but tragically bad for anyone involved with journalism. Not that they're not used to getting fucked by search engines at this point, be it via AMP, instant answers, or AI overviews.

Not that the userbase of 50k is big enough to matter right now, but still...

imiric OP
What journalism? Most of these sites copy their content from each other or social media, and give it their own spin. Nowadays most of them use AI anyway.

Actual journalism doesn't rely on advertising, and is subscription based. Anyone interested in that is already subscribed to those sources, but that is not the audience this service is aiming for. Some people only want to spend a few minutes a day catching up with major events, and this service can do that for them. They're not the same people who would spend hours on news sites, so these sites are not missing any traffic.

malnourish
Broadly agreed, I don't consider the CBS (national) news website to be a source of hard hitting journalism; Reuters, however, is. Reuters and the AP are often the source of these news stations.

I continue to subscribe to Reuters because of the quality of journalism and reporting. I have also started using Kagi News. They are not incompatible.

atonse
All this is doing is aggregating RSS feeds and linking to the original articles.

So this might result in lower traffic for "anyone involved in journalism" – but the constant doomscrolling is worse for society. So I think we can all agree that the industry needs to veer towards less quantity and more quality.

input_sh
RSS feeds are meant to be used by actual users, not regurgitated publicly. RSS readers at the very least have have author info visible and its users tend to be reported to website's analytics with a special user agent.
__jonas
I see! One thing I'm wondering: They say they are fetching the content from the RSS feeds of news outlets rather than scraping them, I haven't used RSS in a bit, but I recall most news outlets would usually not include the full article in their feed but just the headline or a small summary. I'd be worried that articles with misleading headlines (which are not uncommon) might cause this tool to generate incorrect news items, is that not a concern?
imiric OP
That's a fair concern, and I would prefer it if they scraped the sites instead. They could balance this out by favoring content from sites that do provide the entire article in their feeds, but that could lead to bias problems. Maybe this is why their own summaries are short. We can't know for sure unless they explain how it works.
threetonesun
We used to do this with a human created meta tag but I guess this is better?
saghm
If the parent commenter is correct, the concern I'd have would be about transparency. Even if it's good at what it does, I don't think we're anywhere close to a place as a society where it shouldn't be explicit when it's being used for something like this.

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