Site Experiment: Using AI (GPT3) to summarise Topics

So I’ve started an experiment. You may have noticed these appearing:

We are looking at using AI to summarise the first 40 posts on topics.

This data is being sent to Open AI. We will only be doing this on public, crawlable Categories which are consumed by Google and Microsoft in any case. Data is not being added to the remote AI model, but it will be used in their macro analytics around usage of the API.

The summaries themselves are only shown to people who are logged in, so crawlers will not see them.

There’s a downvoting button if you don’t like a summary. Sufficient downvotes (currently > 2) will prompt the system to retrieve a new summary in the hope it will be a better one.

Any concerns or feedback please Reply here.

I’m aware of the current impact that people are unable to post New Topics or Replies. We are working on that now.

OK that should be resolved. If not we will take another look!

I don’t like the summary. I have reduced the medication to zero, this is not reflected in the summary, it gives the wrong impression.

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Yep, I noticed that, let’s downvote it!

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OK any new reply or additional downvotes to that Topic will cause it to re-retrieve.

If this is consistently a problem I will remove this feature. We’ll also add a tooltip to explain the potential pitfalls of the summary.

I am not sure whether the summary is useful at all. I gained lots of benefit by reading through each individual post within a topic. If the topic summary does not sound interesting to me, I would not read it, and consequently miss out on all the information in the individual posts.

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I hear you. Appreciate the feedback. I’m going to leave it up a couple of days or so then run a community poll on keeping it.

I’ve added an important Disclaimer to cover your point:

“Disclaimer: this is highly experimental! This summary is generated by a Large Language Model run by openai.com. It is very sophisticated and can create convincing, relevant, syntactically correct text but is prone to inaccuracies which can sometimes be misleading. Use it to get a flavour, but read the full Topic for the definite information”

OK so they just released “GPT-4” which I’m told is much superior, so I’ve left the summarising system up for now until we can evaluate that.