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Comment by wskish | Hacker News Reader

Here is the output of GPT reading and summarizing this (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33748363). Model seems to be hallucinating the author. Any thoughts on how to improve it?

"The Need to Read is an essay written by Kevin Kelly. In it, he argues that reading is essential not just for acquiring knowledge, but for learning how to write. He cites the example of a science fiction book in which reading has been replaced by a more efficient method of knowledge transfer. He argues that even if such a method existed, it would be insufficient because it would not allow for the kind of discovery that writing does. He concludes that people who want to have ideas can't afford not to read."

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Does GPT-3 offer summaries out of the box? Or do you do it by a prompt like "The summary of the text above is:"?

we are strategically prompting it as such: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33750013

open to all ideas here

Is a "prompt prefix" a thing in GPT-3 or do you mean you combine that prefix with the text of the page into a prompt?

We prepend the prompt prefix to the page text to create the actual model prompt. GPT doesn't have any such abstraction.

And GPT-3 remembers the prefix at the end of a long story and writes a summary?

That sounds very surprising to me. I would have strongly expected it continues the story.

I tweaked the GPT prompt to include the domain name from the story url as additional context. That fixes this one and a few other problematic ones. Here is a typical summary of this story now:

"This is an essay written by Paul Graham in November of 2022. In it, he talks about how reading is necessary not just for acquiring knowledge, but for learning to write well. He argues that there is no substitute for reading, and that people who want to have ideas need to be good at reading."

i think that's also rubbish, just like PG's written opinion piece. How on earth did we then get the great work by William Shakespeare. ShakeSPeare born a time when reading a lot wasn't even possible. There was little to none good content material out there. He was writing more than he could have possible read anywhere else.

So you are under the belief that the written output of one man born in 1564 was of greater quantity than all “good” writing prior to his time? Are you sure you thought this through?

no i am not under the belief of anything other than mentioning PG in a slightly bad light will get me downvotes or a ban on this platform.

> So you are under the belief that the written output of one man born in 1564 was of greater quantity than all “good” writing prior to his time? Are you sure you thought this through?

This is not the point i was trying to make.

I am not a huge fan of PG and I seriously doubt that had anything to do with your downvotes.

It is not PG, it is your sneering and arrogant attitude that attracts downvotes.

I haven't downvoted you, but if I did, it would be for the tone of your comments alone. I don't care about PG one way or another, but I am sick of the total level of glibness on the Internet, and while I gave up on mainstream social media, I would prefer HN to stay a little bit friendlier and less toxic than Twitter or Reddit.

thank you for not downvoting me. i am less arrogant than you think i am a true effective altruist. hahahahaha

You're welcome. Transmitting one's true personality across TCP/IP is harder than it looks.

Shakespeare wrote about Julius Caesar, Titus Andronicus, Richard III, Henry IV, and so on. How did he learn about these people if there was nothing to read?

u make one hell of a point that i thought about. this is recursion but in different languages, which is not really applicable with exception of Richard and Henry. Read in latin, then translate it to THE ORIGINAL OTHER LANGUAGE ENGLISH. You are diluting my genuine point that I am making. The content of way back then was negligible to content that exists now. In all fairness, the opinion brought forward by your messiah PG is not really fit for standing judgement because of the point i brought forward.

Good writer, good idea makers exist without the need to have been good at reading.

> The content of way back then was negligible to content that exists now

But enough to fill a single person's lifetime regardless? So whether you take Shakespeare or Murakami, their individual perspectives are not that different since either of them could have filled their lifetimes with reading.

> The content of way back then was negligible to content that exists now

The burden of proof remains on you. You need to find us an example of an outstanding writer who didn't read much. This doesn't even hold for the classics (eg, Marcus Aurelius or Plato) as far as I can tell.

> your messiah PG

This is low-level, disrespectful, intellectually dishonest and a phallacy. GP said nothing about Graham and you are pulling this out of nowhere.

the last point was for a different thread but as u see platform has been making sure i cant respond in timely fashion to all threads. I sequeezed it in there.

> The burden of proof remains on you. You need to find us an example of an outstanding writer who didn't read much. This doesn't even hold for the classics (eg, Marcus Aurelius or Plato) as far as I can tell.

I think it's fair to say that we don't actually know much about Plato. All stories being told about plato are in third person narrative. I think you are contradicting yourself, Socrates and other ancients were a big proponent of discarding writing in place of dialogue. I think this should suffice as point.

Sorry for calling you dishonest; you do not seem so.

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