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Show HN: Research AI – AI Writing Assistant (researchai.co)
35 points by Mavlonbek1 on Oct 3, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 21 comments


Maybe it's just me, but...

When you're writing anything non-trivial, you ought to have something new and/or interesting to say, otherwise you're just adding noise to the environment.

I can see this being useful in finding ways to rephrase things, improving the structure or flow of a document. But this seems to be suggesting content rather than form or format. Adding content to your writing because it commonly appears in writing similar to yours seems to go against the idea of new and interesting.

That may be good for politicians, but I can see this being misused to 'bulk-up' a small number of ideas or facts into a full paper. On balance, this could easily do far more harm than good.


For the purposes of actual “research” pin citation is critical - you can’t just take somebody else’s ideas or words without attribution. If the AI is pulling in ideas and text from other places that needs to be traceable. Does this provide citation management for where the original content is coming from?


I was dumb enough to sign up... The results are not impressive at all.

Now they have my CC number. There is no way to cancel your account. There is just a gmail support email... Let's see if I get my $14.99 back.


I was tempted to check it out so thanks for trying it out.

Is it basically just GPT3?


What else could it be? Almost all these "clever" new "AI" products are just people taking a particular "trick" for interacting with GPT and obscuring it behind a slick interface. Hilariously, AI Dungeon was probably the most impressive, but even that could be entirely recreated by just interacting with GPT in the raw if you knew the right tricks. The interface just made it more convenient and "magic" feeling because you didn't see the moving parts.

None of the "products" that came after have been as impressive, including copilot. Using GPT as a font for new writing ideas is probably the only "practical" thing it's good for, at least until the tech advances significantly, but charging for a service like this that essentially adds 0 value is pure rent-seeking.


copilot has surprised me on multiple occasions. If I code in an unfamiliar language, copilot was super quick at writing the code I needed based on the method name (instead of needing to fallback to stack overflow).


Didn't see any examples or interactive demo of the main product. The did have something to generate cover letters though.

> This is Johnson Smith, writing to ask to work as a seasonal employee for Enron. I am currently available, and I think I would be a good fit for your position. You said you were looking for somebody with “strong Linux Unix skills,” so I am qualified. I am mainly self-taught, not having taken any college classes, but I am an avid learner, and I am comfortable using free resources to teach myself the skills I need to reach my goals. I worked as a software engineer at IBM for 8 years, primarily on laser sharks.” I am sure you will find that I am not just trying to fulfill a need, but that I am qualified for this position.

I'm not particularly impressed by the output.


So that's the reason why they didn't make a demo available. They must be trying to collect subscriptions now to get the revenue to make improvements, and hope no one notices the transitionary period.


Well it's widely known that Dr. Evil outsourced his sharks with laser beams to IBM, that makes sense to me.



No, I'm sure it's informative, but I don't normally watch videos as a way of evaluating products like this because they're rarely a good use of time, and I don't trust them to give an accurate portrayal. I much prefer to play with a demo.


The video comes across as boring and amateurish. Far too many pauses and "uhms and aahs". The heavy accent of the narrator is also distracting. I would expect a video showcasing a professional language tool to be way more polished and narrated by someone speaking perfect English.


> Research AI generates original text based on your input, so you can be assured about originality.

This is impossible to guarantee with current language-generating model technology, and will likely make IP lawyers salivate and review boards cringe. (case in point, the recent GitHub Copilot outputing-unique-code-verbatim snafus)

Not even OpenAI guarantees that generated output from GPT-3 is original, just that they won't enforce copyright.


Very nice tool for producing blog spam content. No proof or explanation is given on why it could work for any meaningful writing task (let's say research since that the name of the tool) whatsoever.


It will get harder and harder to find actual quality content online, I guess. One might think that perhaps at some point there would be the other side of this - an AI reading assistant that filters through tons of filler texts like the ones generated by this app. It'd have to be very personalized though, because else the content creation algorithms would just be trained on them...

Or perhaps the inflation of filler text content will make people only refer to their trusted sources - well established publishing authorities.


I think scam product review sites already make heavy use of content generators like this. It is so frustrating to click on a "review page" for a product and, after a couple of paragraphs, realize that what you are reading is just grammatically correct word salad, with no real meaning.


I would be hesitant to use the tool in serious paper writing. Considering the history of similar tools like Github Copilot, I am worried that the tool may just copy others' words without letting me know. Such plagiarism can be fatal.

Besides, the tool seems to sequentially predict sentences given a context. This way of writing contradicts with usual scientific writing, where people usually write the skeleton of the paper first, then add details and adjust the logic, and finally refine the wording.

Considering the reasons mentioned above, I don't know how it can be useful as a research AI.


Well, honestly, this looks not great. The "writing" is iffy and the "facts" in the generated content in demo video are questionable at best. Who would use this besides maybe content farms?

I'm neck deep in research and ABD on a CS PhD with a focus on language modeling/NLP and human-centered design...and this kind of stuff makes me a little embarrassed to say that. Anyone involved in AI right now needs to gutcheck that they actually think they're doing something to make the world better and not just noisier or more "sticky" or whatever.


Looks very impressive from your video! What is running it behind the scenes? GPT-3? ParlAI?

This is a service I would love to use, but I'd like to have a free taster before committing my payment details. I know you do a 7-day trial, but at least, for me, there is a big barrier to commit my card details to a random service. Maybe worth taking inspiration from Grammarly by offering a limited free service to get people hooked? Or even letting people sign up for the 7 day trial before giving a way payment details?


Anyway you might unveil a taste of your product's capabilities without a credit card? Also, if successful, I wonder what this is going to do to high school English classes.


> Research AI generates original text based on your input, so you can be assured about originality.

Somehow I am not assured.




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