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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @Scoresby 22h \ parent \ on: Stacker Saloon
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).
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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