How To Summarize Articles and Videos With ChatGPT

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to can use ChatGPT to summarize articles and videos.

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So I'm sure many of you have been hearing about open AI's ChatGPT for awhile now. Maybe you haven't given it a try because you thought well, there's really nothing you could use it for. So a simple thing that ChatGPT and other AI sites like it can do for you that can make you more productive is simply summarize things to make them quicker and easier to read, like articles, news stories, videos, things like that. You might use this as a way to quickly ingest the basic points of something or to determine whether or not you want to read the entire thing. 

So, of course, if you haven't already done it you need to create an account at Chat.openai.com. Then you can use ChatGPT and play around with all of its features. Now to summarize something, what you're going to need to do is actually feed the entire contents of that into the Chat. You're going to do that with Copy and Paste, of course. So, for instance, let's go to this Wikipedia article here. It's much easier to Copy and Paste articles if you use Reader View. So I'm going to click on Reader View here in Safari at the top and now it is a little easier to select the actual article. 

So, I'm going to select the beginning here. Just drag from the first letter down. Then I'm going to scroll down and I'm just going to do the summary here, Shift Click and now I've selected the entire range. So I've got exactly what I want as a selection. So I'm going to do Command C to copy and then go back to ChatGPT. Now I'm just going to ask it in plain English to summarize it for me. I'm going to put a colon there and instead of pressing Return, which would just submit what I've typed, I'm going to use Shift and Return and go to a new line. Now I'm going to Command V to paste and it's going to paste the whole article in there. Then I'm going to press Return and it is going to read the article and summarize it. Let me speed things up here a bit. 

Now the original part that I had copied here, this was 452 words. I'm using my own ClipTools to get that. If I go to ChatGPT I can see it summarized the entire thing and did it in 147 words. If I want it to be even shorter I can continue to Chat here. In order to feed this back in I can ask for something else, like that. Let me speed this up. Of course I could have just asked for that at the beginning and say something like this. Then pasted the text after it. 

It makes sense to do it for longer articles. So I'm going to grab the beginning of the article here. I'm going to scroll down to the bottom and Shift Click to grab the whole article here. Let's checkout the stats on that. It's 1600 words. I'm going to Copy. I'm going to back here and I've started a new Chat. So I've left the other article in its summary in a different chat which is useful in case I want to go back to it and ask for more information. So I'm going to ask it to summarize here and I'm going to just give it a number of words. Shift Return for a nice neat new line there and Paste in and Return. Then wait for the response. 

Now if you like Bullet Lists you can ask for this in Bullet Lists. So I'm just going to continue the Chat here and say, make this ten bullet points. 

Okay so what about a video?  How can it summarize a video. Well, you can't use ChatGPT to jump out to the web and grab information. That's why you have to paste it all there in the Chat box. But, many videos, as a matter of fact pretty much all of them,

include some sort of transcript. Now the videos at MacMost.com all have transcripts under them. You can select the whole transcript, and copy and paste that. But most videos you find online won't have this. So instead I'm just going to go to the YouTube version of this video. Now, even YouTube videos that don't have a transcript YouTube is going to automatically generate them. You can see those if you do Close Caption. But you can get to all of it to Copy it if you click the three dots button here, go to Show Transcript. Then you'll see it here. Sometimes if you click this button with the vertical three dots there's actually a copy transcript option there. But not in this case. Instead you can select and you have to drag all the way down and grab all of the transcript. It's going to grab the time stamp numbers as well, which is fine. 

Now we'll go back to ChatGPT. I'll start a new Chat here and I'll ask it to summarize this transcript. Again, Shift and Return and have a nice new line there. Paste that all in. Make sure I didn't get anything extra when I copied. It looks good. Since I've told it's a transcript it will know enough to avoid the little time stamps and all of that. So now when I press Return I get a summary of the video. Now that's a nice summary. It tells you what the video is about. But what if you wanted to really learn what was there. So doing a Bullet List will help. So you can see here the Bullet List really does give you a lot of information. It does teach you some of the stuff that's there. 

So, of course, ChatGPT isn't perfect. It's not always going to get everything right. But when you provide it with an article or transcript and just ask it to summarize then its chances of getting something wrong are probably pretty small. After all it's just taking the information that's there and summarizing it. I suppose it could leave out a key point if it doesn't recognize it as such. Maybe with a news article it could unintentionally add a bias by what information it selects to include in the summary. But it will certainly just keep getting better and better and there's going to be a lot of competition and they all will probably have some capability of summarizing things as well.

So if you haven't given ChatGPT a try yet or if you've tried it but haven't thought of anything useful you can do hopefully you'll like this idea. Let me know if you like me to do more videos on ChatGPT in the future. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.