FORBES INNOVATION CONSUMER TECH

ChatGPT Hack For

Summarizing Your Work

TJ McCue Senior Contributor

I write about technology here on Forbes and Follow
elsewhere.

0 Jan 26, 2023, 11:52pm EST

Listen to article 5 minutes

This picture taken on January 23, 2023 in Toulouse, southwestern France, shows
screens displaying ... [+] AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

ChatGPT is capable of so much more than simply generating

content. It can also summarize content, write code, give you
suggestions for non-written content, format outputs into a table
or spreadsheet, to name a few more. Keep reading just a bit
further for some advanced prompts for the best summaries out of
ChatGPT.

TJ McCue Screenshot of ChatGPT conversation TJ MCCUE SCREENSHOT OF CHATGPT

CONVERSATION

However, as some have noted, at least for right now, AI is all

about the brains of the user. Ann Handley produces one of my
favorite newsletters on writing and she recently commented
about how the power of AI is in the hands of the user, in the
hands of the content creator. “AI is a tool. That's it. Full stop. It's
a power tool, sure—maybe a diamond-toothed chainsaw
capable of felling a redwood. But it's also just a tool.”

Note: If you are looking for help with your writing, Ann’s bright,
energetic, and dare I say, sassy, email newsletter every couple of
weeks is a must-read. Plus, her Subject Line’s are always
compelling: TA #127: 🤖 What Does AI Mean for Writers? I Have
Thoughts.

The question becomes: Who is holding the AI tool? If it is me, I

need help improving my prompts, thus this journey of what I plan
to be a weekly post, every Thursday (and hopefully earlier than
end of day) to save you time from having to hunt down how
people are improving their prompts. Essentially, as I noted last
week, your success is guided by the degree to which you create a
very useful and concise and explanatory prompt. Also, I plan to
do a weekly prompt exploration and tips for the image AI too,
Midjourney. All right, enough on that - let’s get better at this AI
game.

MORE FROM FORBES ADVISOR

Best Travel Insurance Companies

By Amy Danise Editor

Best Covid-19 Travel Insurance Plans

By Amy Danise Editor

For example, if you had a long rambling brainstorm session with

a couple of business allies, or alone in the shower, and gave that
long, rambling message to ChatGPT, it could make sense of it for
you. But you want to give it some precise and limiting
parameters.

Forbes Daily: Our best stories, exclusive reporting and Forbes

perspectives on the day’s top news, plus the inside scoop on
the world's most important entrepreneurs.
 Email address Sign Up

You may opt out any time. By signing up for this newsletter, you agree to the Terms and Conditions
and Privacy Policy

To get the most out of ChatGPT, it's important to understand how

to give it the right prompts. A prompt is the instruction or
command that you give to the AI program. In the case of
summarizing text, you would give ChatGPT a prompt at the top of
the document that says something like "Summarize the following
text with the most unique and helpful points, into a numbered list
of key points and takeaways:". Then, you would paste the text you
want summarized just below that prompt. I like to do this in a
separate word processing program and then cut and paste it in.

I've found that ChatGPT can process around 2,500 words at a

time, but your results may vary and it almost always throws an
error when you are over that word count. If your document is
longer than that, you'll need to break it up into smaller chunks.
Plus, I've also found that when inserting large amounts of text, I
sometimes need to refresh my browser in between copy and paste
functions, to get the tool to work properly.

This week as I searched on “Advanced Prompts for GPT

Summarizing” I found Brian Petro and his site WFH Brian, had
this gem of a post: The Best Way to Summarize a Paragraph
Using GPT-3. Once I tried it, I found it nudged ChatGPT in the
right direction. Here’s what he wrote:
GPT-3 ChatGPT Summarization Prompt TJ MCCUE SCREENSHOT OF ADVANCED GPT PROMPT

What happens in the above prompt, which I think you could do

with simply adding code-type parameters as well, but what it does
is simply tell it to tighten it up like you have no time for this
nonsense. When I tested it on several long dumps of content, it
worked really well. But ChatGPT, or Verby, as I called
her/him/gender-neutral above, is capable of interpreting a wide
array of our language, our quirks, our ways of saying things. But
as we do this, we are learning new ways to interact with artificial
intelligence. We are all becoming, or will, coders, programmers,
more logic-minded as we talk to the AI robots we are inventing
and refining.

In my post last week, ChatGPT Success Completely Depends On

Your Prompt, I mentioned Rob Lennon and how his crash course
on advanced prompt writing is excellent and has opened up my
thinking process for prompt writing. For the record, this is not an
affiliate link, and I only followed him on Twitter a couple of weeks
ago. If you need a well written, concise guide to doing more with
ChatGPT, his course is solid. But, you can just subscribe to his
free newsletter each week (email archive of past issues) and learn
a ton from there. He offers ways to improve the results from
ChatGPT, from a variety of angles.

If you hear on television or via certain blog commentators that

ChatGPT and other AI tools are simply not up to speed, do not
believe them. The people who are dissing the technology are not
crafting higher-level prompts, so they're getting lower level
content and results from the AI. Embrace the technology and look
for ways to get better at using it. Feel free to share your advanced
tips and ideas with me on social media.
Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website. 

TJ McCue Follow

I'm a Tech and Productivity guy here on Forbes. I also work as an editor for
a national center focused on Nanotechnology... Read More

Editorial Standards Reprints & Permissions

Join Our Conversation

One Community. Many Voices. Create a

free account to share your thoughts. Read
our community guidelines here

Commenting as Guest Log in Sign up

Be the first to comment...

No one seems to have

shared their thoughts on
this topic yet
 Leave a comment so your
voice will be heard first.

Powered by Terms | Privacy | Feedback