The same company that slopifies news stories in their previous big "feature"? The irony.
In my view, it's different to ask AI to do something for me (summarizing the news) than it is to have someone serve me something that they generated with AI. Asking the service to summarize the news is exactly what the user is doing by using Kite—an AI tool for summarizing news.
(I'm a Kagi customer but I don't use Kite.)
They do mention "Summaries may contain errors. Please verify important information." on the loading screen but I don't think that's good enough.
Where's the part where you ask them to do this? Is this not something they do automatically? Are they not contributing to the slop by republishing slopified versions of articles without as much as an acknowledgement of the journalists whose stories they've decided to slopify?
If they were big enough to matter they would 100% get sued over this (and rightfully so).
It's a tool. Summarizing the news using AI is the only thing that tool does. Using a tool that does one thing is the same as asking the tool to do that thing.
> Are they not contributing to the slop by republishing slopified versions of articles without as much as an acknowledgement of the journalists whose stories they've decided to slopify?
They provide attribution to the sources. They're listed under the headline "Sources" right below the short summary/intro.
> They provide attribution to the sources. It's listed under the headline "Sources" and is right below the short summary/intro.
No, they attribute it to publications, not journalists. Publications are not the ones writing the pieces. They could easily also display the name of the journalist, it's available in every RSS feed they regurgitate. It's something they specifically chose not to do. And then they have the balls to start their about page about the project like so:
> Why Kagi News? Because news is broken.
Downvote me all you want but fuck them. They're very much a part of the problem, as I've demonstrated.
You have not, you've thrown a temper tantrum
Kagi News does not disclose AI even.
The speculation most Kagi customers inferred the articles were AI generated could be correct. Or not. We agree they should disclose in any case.
I'm a firm skeptic of the current hype around this technology, but I think it is foolish to think that it doesn't have good applications. Summarizing text content is one such use case, and IME the chances for the LLM to produce wrong content or hallucinate are very small. I've used Kagi News a number of times over the past few months, and I haven't spotted any content issues, aside from the tone and structure not quite matching my personal preferences.
Kagi is one of the few companies that is pragmatic about the positive and negative aspects of "AI", and this new feature is well aligned with their vision. It is unfair to criticize them for this specifically.
Slop means different things to different people. And anything not human reviewed is low effort in my view.