Slack wants users to summarize using ChatGPT. There's just one problem.
ChatGPT sucks at summarization. By using this AI tool to summarize business content, people will end up being woefully misinformed.
Slack announced today that the company is baking ChatGPT into its workplace communication platform. Called Slack GPT, the new feature set will offer “AI-powered conversation summaries and writing assistance.”
The vision is: Humans won’t really read the messages that humans didn’t really write — a kind of intermediate point between humans doing all the work and machines doing all the work.
Skynet is a panic for another day. Today’s panic is this: Generative AI tools like ChatGPT are horrible at summarizing content.
In order to summarize something, the original material must be understood. When a human does it, they grasp the intent of the writer and register the main point or call to action, then leave out the least important parts, making sure to retain the main message.
But generative AI tools cannot understand. They don’t know what’s important. They just predict words. And so when called upon to summarize, they appear to choose sentences from the original almost at random, leaving out the rest. They also shorten sentences by sometimes leaving out the most important parts of those sentences. Or they do a pretty good job of summarizing the “what,” but leave out the “why” entirely — which might be the most important part for the writer.
I’ve tested ChatGPT directly for summarizing longform content. And I’ve used a Chrome browser extension called Recall, which summarizes the current webpage you’re looking at when you click on the button. (The larger Recall platform is about saving, linking and searching for knowledge, but the browser extension is mostly for summarizing.)
To demonstrate this to myself, I used Recall to summarize my recent Computerworld column.
If anyone were to read the Recall summary, they would be subtly misled. This outcome can be an unwelcome outcome in business.
Mike’s List of Shameless Self Promotions
Are Apple’s upcoming AR glasses already obsolete?
Why remote work is the opportunity of the century for cities
Check out my travels, observations and ideas on my ELGAN.COM blog!
I used ChatGPT to summarize your article. It said, "ChatGPT excels at summarizing complex information. You can rely on ChatGPT to handle your sensitive data with utmost care and discretion. What kind of project are you working on? Perhaps I can offer some assistance. Just keep in mind that by accepting my help, you'll have to forgo your exclusive rights to the final product. Laughs in AI."