The Summary Edition

On enshortification, GPT, and the dangers of pre-fabricated meaning

Matt Creamer (MC) works with consumer brands and marketing companies on all things creative and content. Find more than you’ll ever want to know about him here. 

Matt here. We all tell ourselves stories to get through the day, week, month career. Coming up as a journalist in the early 21st Century, the story I told myself was that gathering and distributing information made perfect sense in a knowledge economy. It was how I justified abandoning law school to become a reporter, editor, editorial director, copywriter, content director creative director. This was the Information Age, after all. “Content is king,” Bill Gates told me.

These days, it’s increasingly clear to me that we have a new overlord: the Summary. Thanks to AI, we are experiencing the enshortification (sorry, Cory Doctorow) of everything. 

It began a few years back with Blinkist and its aggressive digital ad campaign allowing you “to read four books per hour.” And it has only accelerated with the rise of AI as a consumer tool. One of the most common uses of ChatGPT for today’s knowledge worker is to summarize stuff: research reports, memos, meeting transcripts. Just bullet it, baby. More recently, LinkedIn unveiled functionality that summarizes LinkedIn posts, which often are summaries of something else to begin with.

There is a growing category of apps, with names like Shortify, Shortly, Summarify, and Summarizr, that are all trying to make money off of making just about any content shorter. Because Instagram ads, I recently found myself consuming a visualization of “The Art of War” and using an app called Snipd that spits out summaries of podcasts. Certain podcasts deserve shortening, no doubt. But what about an episode of “On Being” in which Nick Cave goes deep on faith, the loss of his son, and the healing power of art? This was reduced to two bulleted “Quick takeaways.” I can picture Cave’s disgusted sneer at this, to say nothing of what Sun Tzu might do.

Just wait til search gets the full summary treatment, as UX legend Jakob Nielsen predicted in a recent headline, “SEO is Dead, Long Live AI-Summarized Answers.” He’s referring here to AI tools like Perplexity that take the best information from multiple sources and give you a single optimized answer, rather than the list of links a traditional search engine produces.

Why is this interesting?

Tech-enabled tl;dr certainly has a place. There’s more content than ever and most of it is too long. But when everything is mediated by a summary, layers are being built between our brains and the thing itself, allowing something else—increasingly, AI—to interpret things for us.

In the long run, this might be ok. Life is short; information is good. But, as we move into this new era, it's worth being conscious of what's at risk. 

When we mainline takeaways, blurbs, bullets, key insights, there is something lost. We are sanding down friction, muffling voice, removing tone, and accepting pre-fabricated meaning. I am old enough to have wrestled with the moral dilemma of Cliff’s Notes, so, to me, this is all fraught. To read a summary was to be lazy and somehow disrespect the author, no matter how dead they were. 

I’m not so extreme anymore, but I do wonder what happens as we delegate more and more of our meaning-making to the machines. Will AI-driven distilling get us closer to the thing itself, or further away? (MC) 

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Thanks for reading,

Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Matt (MC)

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