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Cake day: October 22nd, 2023

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  • A constant problem with autotldr is that it uses pronouns which refer to someone who hasn’t been mentioned yet in the abridged article. It makes it look like Biden “has encouraged a growing and well-organized conservative backlash” when that makes no sense. In the original article, “He” actually refers to Donald Trump, but autotldr skipped over the sentence that introduced Trump’s involvement. Similarly, “That finding” does not refer to the major survey mentioned in the previous sentence.

    Honestly I hate this bot and I downvote it every time I see it. This sort of thing is easy to catch when it says something wildly out of character like this. But the same thing happens all the time in ways that are not-so-easy to spot, and wildly misleading to readers. And the pronoun thing is one tiny example. This bot might as well be selecting sentences at random, for all the important context it omits.

    Just read the original article or skip it. Please don’t rely on a program that butchers the original article for the sake of making it shorter. This is the kind of thing that makes us lazy and vulnerable to misinformation.