New to AI Prompt Writing? Learn How to Get Summaries That Cover All the Key Points You Care About
Has ChatGPT ever given you a perfect summary, only to completely miss the point next time?
It might seem to get things exactly right once, but then be completely useless when you use it again. The problem here is your prompt. ChatGPT can’t read your mind, you need to tell it what’s important to you.
Here’s why your AI summaries suck and how you can write better prompts to never miss the points you care about.
ChatGPT Does Not Understand Your Text
Your AI-generated summaries aren’t good because ChatGPT does not understand the content.
ChatGPT uses pattern recognition from it’s training to predict what a summary should look like. It then selects words or phrases that appear to be important. Finally it condenses what it’s determined to be important into a summary.
AI created summaries are not magic, it’s only following a pattern of what a summary should look like.
Asking For A Summary Is Not Specific Enough
Imagine you went to a restaurant and asked the chef for some food.
That’s what happens when you prompt ChatGPT with “please summarize this text”. The model has no idea what you care about. It will rely on it’s general training of what summaries look like and attempt to do that for you.
If you want a summary that is useful, you need to give ChatGPT some more guidance in your prompt.
Give ChatGPT Context And Tell It What Matters To You
There are three core principles for using ChatGPT:
- Provide Context
- Be Specific
- Iterate on Your Conversation
You can’t say “please summarize this text”, being polite doesn’t get you anywhere with AI.
Context and specificity does.
Here’s an example of a good prompt for summarizing:
I am a data engineer and this is a page of documentation on a open-source framework. The framework helps with distributed processing of data files. I need to know if I can use this to solve my problem of X. Summarize in bullet points the reasons why I can or can’t use it.
ChatGPT is a wonderful tool when used right. Take some time to learn it well and you’ll unlock it’s full power.
