Lucid Lens

People don’t always read past the headlines – but headlines don’t tell the whole story. Here we introduce StraightLines, a proof-of-concept tool developed by AOI’s Lucid Lens team, that automatically rewrites news headlines to reflect the content of articles in a more accurate, less sensational way.

Although people often share misleading and sensational content, people also desire accuracy. The Reddit forum “Saved You a Click'' has 1.9 million subscribers and is devoted to crowdsourcing accurate summaries of the content behind headlines. As the About section says: “Don't click on that, we already did. Fighting clickbait for better journalism.”

At the AI Objectives Institute (AOI), under the project Lucid Lens, we developed an automated, scalable solution to the same rewriting headlines.

Thanks to developments in AI, particularly large language models like GPT, we can now automatically read and summarize an article and generate a new headline that reflects its contents, plain and simple. The rewritten headlines are more informative and accurately reflect the contents of the article.

Lucid Lens can help increase the quality of information consumed online. Without interrupting their natural browsing patterns, people will interact with cleaner headlines scrubbed of sensational or misleading information. This could reduce the sharing of misinformation. Further, assuming that rewritten headlines are less sensational, and less emotional, this tool could lower stress associated with “doom scrolling” the news.

Early testing of Lucid Lens is compelling. Its rewritten headlines are more accurate and less sensational. We look forward to launching into research at a larger scale to quantify these effects. We can then investigate deeper questions such as: Does Lucid Lens reduce engagement with misinformation? Do users have a more accurate takeaway from the news? Do users find their time better spent? We have tested internally and we love how it’s made reading the news nicer, but different individuals have different interests and different needs. We really want to know what YOU think! Please join the experiment - we welcome all feedback!