Now You Can Use AI to Summarize the News You Read
AI sums it up well. You can use it to summarize PDFs and task it with splitting YouTube videos into truncated transcripts , for example. Basically, you can put certain content on the robots and they can give you highlights in seconds. And now bots can summarize the news for you too, turning full articles into short cuts.
Artifact, the TikTok news feed , recently released a new AI pimp that works with any news article you come across. Here’s how it works: In the app, select a news article that seems interesting to you. Then click the Aa button on the top menu bar and select Generalize. Artifact analyzes the article for a while before providing you with a summary for your review.
Of course, as we’ve seen since the advent of ChatGPT, AI can be a lot more interesting than a simple, neutral resume. If you tap on the three dots in the summary field, you will have the option to customize the summary in one of four other styles:
- Explain like I’m five : Like the popular subreddit , this mode tells the AI to summarize the article as simply as possible. Will a five year old understand? Probably no. But you could.
- Emoji : This mode translates the summary into the appropriate emoji. Soon we will all be fluent in emoji and no longer use words, grammar and syntax.
- Poem : This option turns the resume into a poem, just in case you want your favorite journalists to pitch their inner Robert Frost. The lyrics even rhyme.
- Gen Z : Here the AI is trying to recap the news as if it were a member of Gen Z. Although, to be honest, it feels more millennial to me: lots of OMGs and hashtags, less ironic detachment and making fun of me for being a millennial.
However, Artifact wants to make it clear that this should not replace reading the news; rather, it should aid your understanding and give you a brief explanation of the main points of the piece before you dive into the details yourself. They make no mistake, fearing: the AI doesn’t “know” anything and often confidently presents incorrect information as a fact, an act known as a hallucination . You don’t want to completely misinterpret current events because the AI cut out their summary.
Also, you’re missing out on a lot if you just rely on resumes. Articles are obviously more than bulleted lists: if you only read what the AI thinks is important, you also don’t see all the parts the author wanted to include – everything from well-researched details to creative use of language to talk about their problems. story.
However, this is a fun AI experiment that can be really useful. On the one hand, you can use it the way Artifact wants to and briefly talk about a long, difficult to understand piece; on the other hand, you can trust the AI and get the news in seconds if you don’t have time for more. After all, one of the promises of this AI revolution is to save us time, even if it comes at the cost of context.