/PRCWT/Guangzhou, March 7, 2023——There seems to be no limit to what ChatGPT can do. So far, people have found a myriad of ways to use this AI chatbot (for better or worse), and we’re not sure if we’ve even come close to tapping its potential. You can use ChatGPT to summarize articles so that you can absorb the information faster. Here’s a handy guide to doing this along with some more useful information about ChatGPT.
What is ChatGPT?
So, before we dive into how to use ChatGPT, let’s talk about what it is. In late 2022, OpenAI, the company behind DALL-E, released an AI chatbot by the name of ChatGPT. Think of it as an artificially-intelligent human being that you can ask questions and make requests of.
You can ask it simple trivial questions such as “How far is Earth from the sun?” and it will tell you. This also goes for advice. You can ask it something like “How do I get my kid to read more?”, and it will give you a list of things to keep in mind.
This chatbot is so powerful that it gets into controversial territory, as it can make original written content. These pieces of content could be as short as short poems or as long as full novels. There are hundreds of books on the Amazon Kindle store that are authored by ChatGPT. Also, it can produce screenplays, pieces of code, and more.
What if you just want to chat? Well, you can also just have a conversation with the bot. It will respond to you and hold a conversation as though it were a human being. The sky’s the limit with ChatGPT.
How to summarize articles with ChatGPT
Firstly, you’ll want to log in to ChatGPT and start a new conversation. Then, in the text field, simply type “Summarize this article”. ChatGPT recommends that you provide a link to the article, the title of the article, and the name of the author. You can do that if you want, but I found that it will still work the same with just a link.
Paste the link into the text field. ChatGPT will give you a paragraph typically between 80 and 150 words summarizing it. Depending on the nature of the article, the word count could vary.
Shorter answers
The summaries are already pretty short, but if you need an even shorter explanation, you can simply type in “TLDR” followed by the link for the article. I found that typing in TLDR gives shorter answers. Depending on the article, when you type in “Summarize this article” the chatbot will give you a more fleshed-out answer. It will introduce it by saying something like “This article is about…”.
When you type in TLDR, it will just start giving you the basic information in a clear and concise manner. In any case, you’ll receive a cut-down version of the article so that you can blaze through it.
The risks of using this feature
As impressive as ChatGPT is, it’s not perfect. There are certain limitations that it has which have a negative effect on the article summarization feature. Because of these, you’ll be summarizing articles at the risk of getting inaccurate information.
For starters, at the time of writing this article, ChatGPT’s reservoir of information only goes up to sometime in 2021. This means that more recent events, news, devices, people, etc. won’t be known to it. This could be an issue if you’re trying to sum up articles about recent events.
This is important because it appears that ChatGPT uses some contextual information outside of the article to help augment the answer. So, if you’re summing up an article about the Galaxy S22, it could pull information that points to it still being rumored.
This feature still needs work
In my usage of this feature, it was hard to count how many inaccurate details I had gotten. All of the results I’ve gotten are rife with inaccurate facts. I summed up a review about a 720p projector, and it stated that it was a 1080p projector.
I fed it an article about the Nothing speaker, and it said that it was about the Nothing Ear (1). What’s significant about this case was that it added additional information that was not present in the article. Nowhere in the article was Carl Pei mentioned. However, in the summary, he was mentioned.
This makes it seem like ChatGPT isn’t as much processing the information present in the article. Rather, it seems like it’s taking certain keywords, matching them to information in its data reserve, and constructing a paragraph based on it.
In the Nothing speaker article, it mentioned that the Nothing speaker was a speaker from Nothing. However, ChatGPT doesn’t have any information on the speaker to recall because it was developed after 2021.
However, it does have information about the Nothing Ear (1), so it used information on that. Also, the Nothing Ear (Stick), Nothing Phone (1), and the Nothing Ear (2) are listed in the article. Since those terms didn’t exist before 2022, ChatGPT doesn’t know anything about them. So, it only mentioned the Nothing Ear (1).
Should you use this feature?
My answer: not yet. ChatGPT is insanely powerful, but it’s still no human brain. While it’s powerful, it’s still miles (lightyears, even) away from reaching perfect human intelligence.
Reading, digesting, and summing up an article is pretty hardcore for an AI to do. Because of this, ChatGPT can’t properly summarize articles. The best thing to do is to wait for the technology to reach that point. In the meantime, don’t use this feature. With as many inaccurate details as I’ve gotten, there’s no way I’d use this for any practical purpose.
