Stop Summarising Our Articles, Or Else
For every honest writer and reader’s sake, stop.
Perhaps one of the most popular posts these days on LinkedIn are the ChatGPT prompt listicles. My stance on AI in general, I have made abundantly clear over several articles. There is no technology inherently good or bad, but all technology can, in the hands of humans, have both beneficial and disastrous effects — even something as simple as a ChatGPT prompt. Therefore, I think the authors of these listicles and each of us individually ought to think a lot more carefully about using certain prompts, as the consequences are further-reaching than many of us ever considered.
Just because IT can, doesn’t mean WE should…
I won’t keep you on the edge of your (toilet) seat. The prompt in question is no other, than the very popular “Summarise this article: {article text}”. Seems innocent enough, doesn’t it? Well, so is a kiss, unless you don’t have permission for it, in which case you’re in trouble. Big trouble.😟 Using this prompt is no different, and to make myself as clear as humanly possible, I’ll temporarily adopt the style I barely ever do, and list out the reasons. Yeah, folks, Attila has written a listicle. Alert the whoever you need to… I don’t care, as long as you take to heart everything that follows.
- This prompt requires you to copy-paste the text of the article. Unless you have a copyright notice stating you are given permission to do that, you actually may not copy that article. It doesn’t matter what the use-case is, articles are protected by law just as much as movies, music, books, etc.
- By pasting an article into ChatGPT, you are feeding the AI with data you have not been given permission to feed it with. You are violating yet again copyright law, but moreover, you might end up finding yourself in hot water when OpenAI gets sued over illegal sourcing of content. Trust me, they won’t take the blame, they’ll point the finger at their users. That’s you.
- You are misusing the content. An article is written and posted online for consumption (reading). You may quote parts of it, but apart from that, doing anything else with it without express permission is disrespectful.
- You are disrespecting the author. Generating a summary removes the author’s style, voice, every unique aspect that makes the article their work. Would you summarise Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody? I bet you wouldn’t. On which note…
- Summarising isn’t the same as a movie trailer, a 30-second preview from a song, or a few random pages from a book. In none of those cases do you have access to the entire content.
- Article summaries often miss some of the facts. Believe it or not, typically the devil’s in the details, and the last thing an author deserves is being considered a sloppy writer because ChatGPT is shite at summarising. And then, of course, there’s the bit where you’re feeding yourself inaccurate or incomplete information.
- No matter how promising the summary is, you will not be coming back to read the entire article. There may be a few exceptions here and there, but an article summary is basically a spoiler. Most people at that point have lost interest and move on.
- You are dismissing the author’s experience, be that personal or professional. Many articles take long hours, days, weeks, or even years to write because the real work isn’t typing the letters and hitting publish. What you’re reading is but the tip of the iceberg. Nobody gave you the right to dismiss all the work, expertise, personal trauma authors put into their articles. Don’t be an asshole.
- You are literally robbing people of their income. Newsflash. Authors get to eat, have a roof over their heads and do everything that you do, thanks to those letters they type and publish. Many get paid for read-time and engagement. For instance, on Medium, an article that wasn’t read for at least 30 seconds, is considered not read at all. It takes less than 10 seconds to copy and paste an entire article into ChatGPT. If you assumed all articles get paid for upfront, well, you assumed wrong.
- In the case of articles that are paid for upfront (on other platforms or news outlets), not spending time on the site itself will likely result in a sharp decline in ad revenue, which will consequently result in reducing the pool of writers, their financial rewards, or entirely going out of business.
- You’re being incredibly selfish. You are making the executive decision that your time is more important than an author’s work, financial stability and mental wellbeing. You are trying to remove risk from reading by acting entitled. All content produced by humans contains risks. It can be anywhere from utter rubbish to masterpiece. Deal with it. If you can’t, don’t consume content, or stick to authors who have already proven themselves (before ChatGPT).
I know some will argue in the comments that the system is broken, and summarising articles is secretly a noble act to bring down the current online monetisation models. It’s not. Every terrible act in history pointed to broken systems, and never people at themselves. Perhaps being paid for read time or engagement is not ideal, perhaps ad revenues aren’t a great idea either. I am not stating these are gold standards, but they are the ones we have. This is what drives armies of writers, authors, and journalists around the world, creating content, creating digital history for current and future generations.
You don’t like the system? Change it. But don’t make authors collateral damage, as you’ll soon find there’s nothing left to “summarise”.
Was that succinct enough for ya?
Attila Vago — Software Engineer improving the world one line of code at a time. Cool nerd since forever, writer of codes and blogs. Web accessibility advocate, LEGO fan, vinyl record collector. Loves craft beer! Read my Hello story here! Subscribe for more stories about LEGO, tech, coding and accessibility! For my less regular readers, I also write about random bits and writing.
