First adventure in AI

An established use of AI Chatbots in academic study is to feed in a text and request a summary. A condensed version of an article or similar text can be used to see if a text is worth giving the time to read in full, to prime our minds for the text, or just to simplify a long, complex piece. For my first reading task of the PG Cert I decided to do things backwards! I read the article in normal manner, and also wrote my reflections in a post on this blog. Only after this did I open my Bot of choice, claude.ai (free version!), and give it some prompts. I did need to convert the PDF to a text only file (pdftotext, a command line program on Linux) as the original file was far above claude.ai’s maximum permitted size.

Why did I choose to do things in reverse (yes, it was a choice!)? It was to ascertain how well the program would respond, and to see how useful it might be in the future. In total I gave it four prompts, having first uploaded the text:

• Firstly, “Produce a 400 word summary of this text.”: claude.ai gave me a 397 word response in four paragraphs. I thought it captured the essence of the text well, and it was interesting to see how well it paraphrased the original text rather than simply selecting from the content.
• Secondly, “Produce a 100 word summary of this text.”: I expected such a short summary to be of little use, but it actually captured the essential thrust of the text quite well. Again, it paraphrased the original, and not always in the same way as the 400 word summary. Of course, it may depend on the individual text.
• Thirdly, “Using bullet points, list the eight most salient points from the text.”: using 165 words, it offered a highly user-friendly output in order to gain a fair overview of the text. I would also add that the points listed are an accurate representation or the article. I’m sure to use this type of prompt in the future.
• Finally, “List the artists mentioned in the text, in order of most frequently mentioned to the least.”: and that’s what it did! 15 of them in a numbered list. How helpful this prompt was for this text, I’m uncertain, but the same idea could be helpful for other tasks.

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