Summarizing Books with Human Feedback
openai.com
openai.com
The narrator, a Yale graduate, moves to New York to learn the bond business. He meets Gatsby, a man from a wealthy Midwest family who attended Oxford. Gatsby invites the narrator to lunch and shows him his war medals.
Gatsby wants Daisy to tell Tom she never loved him and wants to go back to Louisville to get married as they had planned 5 years ago.
Mrs. Wilson is killed by a car that doesn't stop. Gatsby says he tried to stop Daisy from driving, but she couldn't, so he pulled on the emergency brake.
After two years, Nick remembers the police and photographers at Gatsby's house after his death.
On the last night, Nick looks at Gatsby's house one last time.
I doubt this has any value for what is considered to be literature, and probably isn't very useful for most of the rest of fiction either. I'd be curious to see this be used on dense non-fiction to extract the salient points (I'm imagining this being run on Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century), but based on this sample I'm not optimistic.
I often find myself wanting to continue a series that I didn't finish or just had a book come out without rereading all the previous ones. Having a big compendium of five-page plot summaries would be incredible.
In truth, I think this is something AI is capable of doing, but are we really comfortable in passing information through an interface where we cannot even know what is lost.
This topic begs so many questions that I guess are not unique to this problem. Who is all of this intelligence for, though?
What if we forget how to write well?
Personally I have a library on my kindle that's too much for me to read in full, considering I'm constantly adding to it. I read a lot of books but good summaries strike me as an improvement for the cases where I either never get to a book, or just read its first several chapters.
For the books I do fully read, summaries could make for nice reviews. With some further development, it seems this technology could turn the summaries into quiz questions, which would really help lock in long-term learning.
That is basically a "divide and conquer" approach for simultaneously learning a complex task *and* allowing humans to evaluate it.
> To test scalable alignment techniques, we trained a model to summarize entire books. [...] This work is part of our ongoing research into aligning advanced AI systems, which is key to our mission. As we train our models to do increasingly complex tasks, making informed evaluations of the models’ outputs will become increasingly difficult for humans. [...] Our progress on book summarization is the first large-scale empirical work on scaling alignment techniques.
I wonder what the purpose of such summaries is - is it to define the plot section ala Wikipedia movie plots or IMDB plots or is it for really condensing knowledge into abstracts.
The latter does require a certain degree of both cognition around the domain as well creative writing to make it engaging.
You'll be providing with the right AI-written story, but they'll still go read something else -- unless you can convince them that you're on their side (not with stories but actual-life-changing stuff). But we're not working on that and prefer toying with tools and algos.
Why should an 'AI' have universal access to this material, and not the working class? Especially the working class in the global south. They are so far from universal access. It's only a matter of time before the capitalist academia comes down on emancipatory initiatives/projects (yet capital disrupting), like Sci-Hub.
I write 'AI' because i see the pursuit of a general artificial intelligence in the labs of the propertied class (on their own profit-seeking, commons-hostile terms), despite the fact that there is widespread suffering caused by today's global production system, as a disgusting joke.
The supposed inevitability of today's widespread suffering across the world is a false truth pulled over our eyes by the propertied class.
World peace and full equality in this new digital age is a matter of priorities.