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nozzlegear 2 hours ago

> This article is filled with emotional triggers designed to drive engagement. Even the title. It can be hard to separate those things from objective facts.

> Putting an llm in front of it helps me focus on the facts.

This argument reminds me of one of Ted Chiang's short stories about "lookism," which (iirc) was a natural preference for people to prefer people who are attractive. In the story, a new technology was developed that could interact with a person's brain to "turn off" their lookism and instead just consider what a person brings to the table without your brain factoring in your own attraction to them.

I won't spoil the story, but a little arms race develops in the technology to "turn off" natural human reactions to things like attraction, emotion in speech, etc., so that users won't be swayed by them in advertising, political campaigns, anything that could possibly have an agenda. By the end, people using the technology are described as highly autistic – unable to perceive any human emotional context, triggers or attraction – so that they're able to interpret just a person's intent and not be manipulated by the underlying motivations.

It's an interesting story, your use of LLMs to cut out the "emotional triggers" from an article and get just the "objective facts" reminds me of that.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58050245