Urbazon/Getty Images I have a goal to read one book every month. On the weekends, I cozy up on the couch with my coffee, and I leave my phone in another room. The point of this ritual is to create space that’s unbound by time and to-do lists — but as my reading list grows, I find myself trying to get through more pages and more books.
I wanted to see if I could use artificial intelligence to summarize the main concepts, lessons and wisdom of a book I might not get to for months or even years. Keep the beautiful prose for the physical page, but use AI to summarize nonfiction business books, for example. I picked Deep Work by Cal Newport to test run on ChatGPT . After using various AI tools, I thought ChatGPT, one of the best-known text prompt chat tools, would do the job best. I also have the $20 a month membership, so I wanted to make the most of it.
But the mission wasn’t very successful — partly because of plagiarism protections built in to the tools (and rightly so), and partly because it took a whole lot of prompt engineering and independent research to get anything worth using. Ponder on the parameters
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The very first thing I learned was that ChatGPT doesn’t have access to full manuscripts — to avoid plagiarism and respect intellectual property rights — and just summarizes from existing information online.
If I’ve learned anything about AI , it’s that the preprompt thinking is just as important as the first prompt. I didn’t just want a huge summary of the book. I wanted to learn Newport’s big ideas, arguments, strategies and frameworks regarding deep work, so I could apply it in my work.So, I started the […]
I Tried to Use AI to Summarize a Book. The Plagiarism Protections Were on Point
