How to Use ChatGPT to Summarize an Article

Unless you are living under a rock, it cannot be possible that you haven’t heard about Chat GPT or used it at least once. Time for a confession, we all read reviews before starting a new web series or watching a movie. People want the best of everything and don’t like to spend time reading or watching something that is not worth their time. This is where the knight in shining armor comes to your rescue- The ChatGPT. ChatGPT can be used as an article summarizer which can be used to generate a brief para before you delve deep into a 3000-word article. It’s not a smart move to rely on it completely, the ability of ChatGPT to summarize is much of a hit-or-miss business. But with countless hours of experience and a lot of research, we have found the ultimate tricks that make Chat GPT the best summarization generator.

Why Do We Need Summaries?

According to a study, articles with high authority have an average word count of 1447 words. The probability of Google ranking articles with a high word count on the first page is higher.

Research articles on the other hand consist of 2000 – 4000 words or even more depending upon the topic. These consist of technical terms and might take longer time than reading a usual article. This makes finding the required information a tiresome and time-consuming deal.

ChatGPT, as an article summarizer, generates fabulous summaries that can save time and help you get the gist of the subject of the article. Before spending a lot of time reading and navigating through a lot of articles you can just generate a summary and the whole process of finding the required information becomes speedy and easier.

What are the Prerequisites?

Just like you need a basketball to put in a hoop and score, there are some prerequisites for a article summarizer generator. ChatGPT can be used in several ways as a text summarizer, each method requires a different set of tools.

The list of prerequisites includes

• The Link or Soft copy of the Article – ChatGPT can be a text or article summarizer but fails with the snaps of text. You may try the OCR tools but even they have some limitations and you have to scan through the result which defeats the primary purpose of saving time.

• Accurate prompts – GPT responses vary depending on the correctness and accuracy of the prompts. Since the launch of ChatGPT articles and blogs are coming up with prompts to make the responses more brief and accurate.

• Browser Extensions – Chat GPT provides you with several browser extensions. This eliminates the need of using the web mode and with extensions, you can generate summaries in just a few clicks.

• Coding Software – Beveloper’s favorite method of generating summaries is by using different coding languages. One such language is Python, using a small code snippet you can import a document and can generate conditional summaries pretty easily.

How To Summarize?

As an AI chatbot, ChatGPT can generate human-like responses to proper prompts. There can be multiple ways to use ChatGPT as an article summarizer.  Besides knowing how to use a method you must also know its limitations and situations when it fails.

Ways to summarise:

1. Using TLDR

The term TLDR is popular among the writer community. The acronym stands for Too Long; Didn’t read, it signifies that the text is not read because it’s too long or the word count is too high.

TLDR is the quickest and easiest text or article summarizer. The use is pretty simple, just type TLDR as the prompt followed by the document link. If the content is not available on the internet or you don’t have the link for it you can replace the link with the text of the article.

2. Integrating ChatGPT and Python

Seasoned developers prefer code snippets over regular prompts. The step-by-step process is given below:

1. Import necessary dependencies like PyPDF2 for PDF processing and OpenAi for using the GPT-3.5 turbo.
2. Set a string, that will contain the summary
3. Set path to pdf to open and read the pdf using PyPDF2
4. Create a loop code to crawl through all the pages and extract the text.
5. Generate a summary using GPT-3.5-turbo
6. You will be required to concatenate the summary as Python provides straight sentences.

Here is a code snippet for the Python and ChatGPT integrated summarization generator.

3. Using Custom Prompts

The most popular use of ChatGPT is the use of custom prompts, being an AI Chatbot it acts closely based on the instructions given to it. So the instruction has to be spot on.

You may start with a simple prompt followed by the article “Summarize the following text” If you are not satisfied with the response you can Regenerate the Response and give it another chance. Surprisingly every time you regenerate a response, ChatGPT’s summarization generator presents you with a different response.

Additionally, you can customize the prompt and make it even more specific. Some good examples of customizing prompts to summarize an article are:

• Tell it the length of the summary.
• Specify the focus of the summary, if you want information about something particular.

4. Browser Extensions

Extensions are used to save time, as they act as a link between a web tool and your browser. Similar to this, the ChatGPT extensions can simplify the process of summarising by eliminating a few steps.

There are two such essential extensions:

• ChatGPT for Chrome

This works like a bookmark, as you click the extension ChatGPT mini version drops down. The rest of the process is similar to that of the web version.

• ChatGPT Sidebar

This is an advanced extension that automatically picks up the text selected and asks for the next action – Summarize, Grammer, Explain.

Drawbacks And Limitations

ChatGPT is a fairly new tool. Developers are continuously making it better and the final product will be much more advanced. Currently, it is far from perfect, and social media doesn’t spare a single opportunity to troll it.

There’s no doubt about how good ChatGPT is but there are certain things that should be kept in mind while using ChatGPT for summarizing articles.

• Old Database: ChatGPT functions on an older database. If your prompt asks about a recent event or a new topic, It often begins its response with the fact that its database is old and the knowledge is cut off after September 2021.

• Limited Tokens: The free GPT model comes with a token limit of 4096 tokens which is around 3000 words, while the paid version comes with GPT-4 and has double the amount of tokens/words.
• Accuracy: ChatGPT has been in a lot of controversies lately because of fake references and inaccurate responses. One such case was covered by FoxNews where lawyers who used ChatGPT included fake legal research.

Conclusion

An indispensable step in summarizing an article is reading it, which is time-consuming and a tedious task. Using the innovative technology of ChatGPT you can generate a summary in a jiffy.

The tool is getting better with each prompt and the paid version can surpass most of its limitations. We discussed the various ways and steps which you can use to summarize articles, research papers, or reports, with which you can save a lot of time and effort.