Am I the only person who isn't hugely interested in summarizing emails? I don't want emails summarized because that bypasses a tell-tale sign that said email isn't worth reading in the first place.
I kinda want to run some of our CEOs emails through summarizing, because I feel that there's a very real chance that I'll just get a black page back.
Other than that, I'm with you. The need for summarizing is a symptom of our increasingly poor communication and degrading writing skills. That, and SEO optimization which attempts to hit as many keywords as possible.
We're heading in a direction where people will use LLMs to pad their writing, so it will appear more substantial then it actually is. The receiver will then parse it though another LLM, because the writing has now become to convoluted, or they simply don't have the time for a ten page essay (in which case the none padded draft would have sufficed).
Admittedly I have found a few useful cases for LLMs, mostly related to text parsing and information extraction, which can be seen as summarizing I suppose, but mostly I have a pretty negative view of LLMs. Part of it may be me getting older and not fully understanding how they work, partly it's also their deployment in areas where I believe communication should be human to human.
> The need for summarizing is a
> symptom of our increasingly
> poor communication and degrading
> writing skills.
Whilst I agree there is a societal decline, there has also always been a corporate tendency towards verbosity and opaqueness.
The old rule from the days of memos still seems to apply: ignore first paragraph, get positive / negative gist from second, learn about the impact in the third, ignore remainder.
I'm vehemently against the whole Apple Intelligence feature of summarizing personal communications, like the AI-generated break-up text summaries that were floating around. But I've found most other AI summarizing to be pretty useful. The problem is the lack of trust and reliability, so even when those summaries seem to save me time, if the topic is of any actual significance or value I'm forced to read the original materials anyway, which ultimately results in spending more time consuming the same information.
I agree, I've read about lots of LLM-based services for summarising content, and I really wonder whether that's because this is something so many people want, or if it's just because it's something LLMs are good at so they are easy to build and then they get hyped because LLM.
Anything that can be expressed in a few sentences, should be, and I tend not to read media that doesn't abide by that rule. If I'm reading long-form content it's because I am looking for detail and nuance that would be lost in a summary.
I do think a reliable video summary generator could be useful occasionally. Interestingly Orbit seems to work on YouTube, presumably by parsing YT's auto-generated transcript.
Honestly, I don't receive any emails which are even worth summarising. I unsubscribe from marketing emails, and the humans who email me aren't writing more than a couple paragraphs at most. It becomes more effort to hit a summary button, wait for it to generate, and then read something of roughly the same length.
