The week between holidays, and how to summarize with a reason

December 28, 2022 has no AI headline of its own. It sits in that strange week between Christmas and New Year, when offices are half empty and inboxes quietly fill up. ChatGPT was four weeks old (Wikipedia puts its release at November 30, 2022), and a lot of people were still figuring out what it was for.

One of the first useful answers most people found was boring and real: make this long thing shorter.

The catch-up pile

If you've ever come back from a holiday break, you know the pile. A 40-email thread you were cc'd on. A policy update from your landlord. A school newsletter. A contract renewal with eleven pages of terms.

Pasting all that into a chatbot and typing "summarize this" feels like it should work. And it sort of does. You get a shorter version. The trouble is that a shorter version of everything is not what you needed. You needed the two lines that affect you.

Why "summarize this" falls flat

A summary is a choice about what to keep. When you don't tell the model what you care about, it keeps a little of everything in roughly the same proportions as the original. The deadline buried on page nine gets one clause, same as the boilerplate on page one.

People blame the model for that. I think it's a prompt problem, and an easy one. Give the summary a job.

Before:
Summarize this.
[pastes 11-page renewal agreement]

After:
I need to decide by Friday whether to renew this agreement.
Summarize it for that decision: what it costs now vs. last
year, any new fees or changes, the cancellation terms, and
anything I'd regret not noticing. Under 150 words. Quote the
exact sentence for each point so I can find it.
[pastes 11-page renewal agreement]

Same document, completely different result. The first prompt gives you a book report. The second gives you a decision memo, with receipts.

That request for quotes deserves its own note. A summary is the model's paraphrase, and paraphrase is where small errors creep in ("30 days" becomes "a month," a "may" becomes a "will"). Asking for the exact sentence behind each point costs you nothing and makes checking take seconds instead of minutes.