alt Hacker NewsThe idea is amazing, and… how to say it?; The results are horrible to read in the same way as AI writing when AI writing is bad.†
And I mean this in the best possible way. It's really interesting.
There's this feeling of an intrusive forcing of something. A feeling that things don't… breathe? Feels like one already sifts out this sort of semantic weight when reading and to me the highlighting adds strange janky emotional-processing noise to the text; Uncomfortable and somewhat… dissonant?
It's really, really interesting. I hate how disparaging to the project this comes out!! my apologies for that! I LOVE the project and what it reveals about text comprehension and perception of saliency and rhythm in written text!
(† footnote: feels like this to me)
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i completely agree with this. it's a very cool idea and also i hope nobody uses it in actual writing
Thanks this is such a thoughtful comment! This project was definitely more to explore the idea than to make it certain that this was the answer. I think my goal was more so from the perspective of if text is streaming by very fast like it would be for an agent is there anything we can do to make it easier to read. The answer may genuinely be no but I think if we can get to something where the program highlights things accurately then in theory the reader could skim faster. I remember debaters who have to speak/read very fast highlight and format the sources (https://youtu.be/0FPsEwWT6K0?t=121&is=7fFn3BjKUnJKPXu3) so in theory it may be helpful for high speed cases. But I definitely agree with your point that it would be annoying if for example a book was formatted in this way haha