Brief: AI-summarized news

Like a lot of people, I’ve been going down the rabbit hole of playing with the ChatGPT AI recently.

I realized that it’s pretty good at summarizing news articles, so I decided to build a website that shows 10 NYTimes articles and short summaries of them (so that I can read them with my minuscule attention span).

A day or so later, I finished Brief, a website that does just that!

A few notes:

• It uses the NYTimes Most Popular API, which is surprisingly good and free!
• It scrapes the content from the article via HTML, which is not bad but sometimes doesn’t work very well.
• ChatGPT doesn’t have an API yet, so I’m spinning up a virtual browser using Puppeteer and logging into my OpenAI account pretending to be a user using the demo.
• The Puppeteer runs when the Astro site is building on Vercel, which only happens once an hour, so it’s not that much ChatGPT usage.
• To get Puppeteer working on the Vercel builders, I had to add a few arguments that are apparently 🚨 not safe 🚨 but oh well:

const browser = await puppeteer.launch({
  args: ["--no-sandbox", "--disable-setuid-sandbox"],
});

Update: OpenAI quickly got smart and put bot detection in front of ChatGPT, so this stopped working. I had it coming for me. The site is frozen in time to when it stopped working.