The not-so fresh synthesizer

We are moving into a very different world where nobody talks about freshness of content anymore.

A few years ago, when the teachers used to ask the students to summarize the lessons, a few shone, a few struggled and it used to be 10 minutes of critical thinking by the students to give a crisp or not so crisp key takeaway from that class. Those 10 minutes were helpful for students who didn’t pay attention earlier but here is a catch. If the summary was not correct, the teacher used to intervene and finally everyone understood the real crux of that topic.

Fast forward to today’s classroom and with the help of ChatGPT, the summaries for any topic in the world is available to you in split seconds. In fact, Google has also these summarized view of searches before the search results appear. So, in a way you are getting the summaries but there was no research done by the user. No doubt it’s a great way to save time but there’s no validation done to ensure the summary that you have in front of your eyes is the summary you are looking for. You are moving with faith that somebody has done the hard work of summarizing something for you.

You might say, oh, what’s the harm in this? Afterall, summarizing is a mundane task and AI is automating it for you. You should be thankful!

Summarization is not just about putting a few highlights. It should bring out the essence of the content, clearly impact the decision to be taken thereafter.  Summarization depicts the understanding of any topic; it gave you the edge to think and apply the nectar of information to different fields. If there is no teacher from our classroom example above, who will validate those points for you?

Did you realize that while the summaries look tempting, there’s no freshness to it. It’s like paragraphs you get from some torn off pages of a book. You don’t know what that book is, you don’t know who the author is, you just get ready made content that is stale I would say. On the contrary, when you searched Google, you get date wise info, the blogs had dates and it gave some context. Today you get blurbs which you fix artificially in a garden where you don’t know which blurb came from which author, or rather don’t care about the author anymore!

You just get some content that you go through once and paste it for quick visibility, completion of the task and move on.

Organizations today are already impressed with the summarization capabilities of GenAI and see it as a magic wand to cut cost and time specially in operational processes of BPOs/KPOs, even for that matter in law firms. This can be leveraged as the first step to access important information to save time. But what is the guarantee that the summarization results are giving you the right picture? What if a legal case gets synthesized in a manner that it overlooks key deciding factors and the lawyer didn’t have time to cross check it? Gen AI is evolving and if it starts working with the same intelligence of humans then it’s more a cause of concern than of happiness. Today we are only happy that something is getting summarized that looks familiar to us and is delivered in record time.

So, the real question is – are you enjoying it?

Ask real authors and people who are well read, and they will give you a different opinion. For them, words are sacred. It can’t be manipulated, automated and even if they are getting synthesized artificially, there’s no charm to it. It may look out of the world initially but over time, it will give you flat options that will not move anyone!

We can’t go back in time to rewind the tech revolution however the best thing to do if you are ever required to summarize is to read a little more on the topic, research if possible and distil the summary to get more context of what is being talked about.

As for the Before AI (BAI) people (all those who continue to think through natural intelligence), they will still rule the depth of any topic because their methods are not quick fixes but thoroughly read, verified and will last a lifetime.