Why Substack (and Medium) should introduce AI-assisted summaries

Not just a feature idea, but rather a reframing of audience and value.

Yep, this was generated by AI too (with a little assist from me at the end)

AI-generated summary of this article:

Substack’s recent article emphasizes their aim to enhance the reading experience, catering primarily to avid readers. Yet, there exists a potentially larger demographic seeking quick knowledge absorption, constrained not by content quality but by reading time. The solution? AI-assisted summaries. These could offer readers the crux of articles without requiring deep dives into extensive content. While AI’s content generation capabilities are well-recognized, its ability to summarize can be revolutionary for platforms like Substack and Medium.

However, it’s crucial to maintain a balance, ensuring authors don’t feel sidelined by AI’s role. Solutions could include involving authors in fine-tuning summaries, monetizing AI-generated summaries to benefit authors, and navigating copyright complexities.

With AI tools set to reshape content consumption, platforms that embrace AI summarization early can cater to evolving reader preferences, positioning themselves at the forefront of industry innovation.

A better internet for readers

Substack’s recent article about their mission ☝️ paints a picture of serving avid readers with an unparalleled reading experience. While this is commendable, I’d argue there exists another, possibly larger, demographic craving not just “a great reading experience,” but rather “the knowledge that these authors have.” For many of us, the constraint isn’t the quality of content delivery, but rather the time required to consume it. This is where AI-generated summaries could bridge the gap, enabling a quicker knowledge transfer while potentially even reducing reading time.

AI’s Potential: Beyond Generation to Summarization

Mark Twain once said, “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.” Summarizing has always been a challenging, creative, and very human endeavor. While AI’s content generation capabilities are well-praised, their potential to consume long-form data and summarize — to distill complex information into digestible nuggets—might be even more revolutionary. The beauty lies in enabling readers to grasp core concepts without delving deep into lengthy articles.

Fitting the feature in

When considering this feature, the details of the UX/UI are somewhat secondary to the final output: I’m sure a good Designer and team could introduce and integrate the feature well. But a key question is … what user initiates this feature? While the temptation might be to bypass authors and generate AI summaries directly for readers, this approach might alienate the very creators that give platforms like Substack their essence.

Addressing Potential Pushbacks

A significant concern would be authors feeling sidelined or devalued by AI’s role. However, there are multiple ways to address this:

• 🤝 Author Involvement: Allow authors to fine-tune AI-generated summaries, or even prompt to revise or regenerate them.
• 💰 Monetization: Introduce AI summaries as a premium feature, with authors benefitting from the revenue generated.
• 🔑 Ownership: Navigate the tricky waters of copyright by considering AI-generated summaries as either an author’s intellectual property or through shared credit. This concept isn’t new and has been discussed, notably during the 2023 Hollywood writer’s strike.

Yep, also generated by AI (with another small assist from me at the end)

Embracing the Inevitable

The emergence of AI tools, capable of generating content summaries, is inevitable. Platforms like Substack and Medium have an opportunity not just to adopt but to pioneer this transition (before a 3rd party comes along and does it anyway, copyright laws or not). By introducing controlled, author-friendly AI summarization, they can cater to an audience hungry for knowledge, ensuring that they remain ahead of the curve and in sync with technological advancements.

👀 Pssst: you just read an AI-assisted article!

Hey, 👋, human author (Alex) here. In writing this article, I knew what I wanted to say generally, but had a hard time carving out time to author a well-structured article. So I tried something new: I wrote down the “quick” version of my thoughts … not just an outline, but a few trains of thought with paragraphs for structure. It was an ok starting draft for an article, but was short and contained awkward transitions.

So … I asked ChatGPT to help!

1. I explained to ChatGPT what I had so far (a short draft), and that I wanted it to be longer and “said better,” but still within the rough structure the draft was in.
2. I also asked it to retain my voice from my notes (which I think was partially successful in the end, perhaps more successful than I realize given that I liked the results!)
3. Then I pasted in the draft, with subheads separated, into ChatGPT and watched it come back with a result in seconds. 😱 I liked it!
4. I pasted that into Medium, then read through to tweak a few sentences, and add in some of the original flavor/concept here and there. Then I added this passage to the bottom of the article!
5. I then asked ChatGPT to summarize it’s own refined article—doubling down on the purpose of this article—then asked it to give me a slightly longer summary that I then pasted above.

Honestly, it’s not perfect, but my first-blush edits weren’t much. The ChatGPT refinement on my article were definitely better than my initial draft, but it speaks to the same points.

An especially fun tidbit: in my draft, I wrote this:

Summarizing text is, I think, a somewhat famously difficult task — insert the Mark Twain quote about writing a short letter being more difficult than a long one — and it’s a job that’s been a very creative human endeavor.

And then in ChatGPT’s refinment … it actually wrote in the quote! It even lead a paragraph with it. Very clever.

Mark Twain, ruminating about the power of Artificial Intelligence. (Yes, also brought to you by AI)

All in all, I get that people are excited about the raw generative capabilities of AI — “Hey ChatGPT, write me a poem about pancakes 🥞”—but I think there’s much more practical power in AI as creative augmentation (in part via it’s ability to interpret and, yeah, summarize). This article may not have seen the light of day without the time-saving help from ChatGPT, so I’ll call this a strong example of the effect.