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123 sats \ 2 replies \ @fauxfoe 22 Jun \ parent \ on: Stacker Saloon
Having built AI summary interfaces for clients, I can say this stuff is not as simplistic as people think. And only the most simplistic analysis could conclude that a summary is equivalent to a full treatment.
A document might serve many audiences, some of whom want more or less detail. Sometimes the summary is enough but you want the detail there in case you want to dive in on some aspect or another.
Maybe you want the summary to know if it's worth reading in full.
And summaries are not one-size-fits-all. When I ask AI to summarize something, I ask it to pull out specific things I care about. You might summarize it differently because you care about other things.
A summary is a lens. It distorts. It also magnifies. Lensed views are useful, but they are not the original.
These are great points. Especially describing a summary as a lens. I take it you do not feel summaries compete with the thing they summarize for reader's limited attention?
I have the sensation that many people will ask for a summary of an article and then the article goes into the ever growing heap of tabs to be read. I'm wondering if writers will feel pressure to write in a way that tries to short-cut the summaries (leading with tl;drs or just write massively condensed versions).
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I'm no expert on general-purpose AI summaries. I don't use AI for that much. My clients are using it to, e.g., summarize applications so a reviewer can get high-level context. We pull out the info we most care about, which isn't usually duplicative of what the application includes in its intro.
I don't agree that summaries will replace reading the full doc for a lot of people. People already read headlines instead of articles. Now maybe they'll read headline+summary instead of article. That's not terrible.
And writers are already writing tl;dr. Look at Axios. It is popular because it leads with the takeaways. They offer training in how to write like this as a service to corporate customers. If more humans did that, we might need less AI summarizing.
I am so sick of articles that spend a thousand words painting a picture of how the writer came to care about the topic, describing the great-grandparents of the subject of the piece, and musing on the feathers of a bird they saw they day. Get to the point!
I would like a firefox plugin "summarize this page". I haven't installed on yet, but I bet it exists and maybe I should try it.
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