Hello!
I use AI to get across things faster most days, and I'm not about to stop. Then I read a study this week that makes me consider when and how I use it in my life.
The point.
Summaries are fine. Better than fine, they're the fastest way to work out what's actually worth your time. But what they take out is the synthesis, and the synthesis is where all the learning happens. So the rule is: summarise to decide if you'd like to go deeper, then go to the source and do your own reading and research.
The picture.
First off, summaries are fantastic. Whatever you want to know, you can ask your AI tool of choice and get a decent version in four minutes. Low on time, need the gist before a meeting, trying to work out whether a book is worth three weeks of your evenings. Genuinely useful, and something we're all doing more and more.
But a recent study on learning makes me worried about how much we rely on AI for information gathering.
Last year, two researchers ran seven experiments with about 10,000 people. Everyone got a topic. How to plant a vegetable garden, how to live a healthier lifestyle, that sort of thing. Half learned about it through ChatGPT, and half got Google links they had to read themselves. Then everyone wrote a bit of advice for a friend.
The ChatGPT group:
Spent less time on their answers.
Reported learning less, and feeling less ownership of what they knew.
Wrote advice that was shorter and had fewer facts in it.
Wrote advice three times more generic. Everyone who used the AI wrote roughly the same thing.
Then the researchers handed the advice to strangers who had no idea where the information came from and had them evaluate it. Intuitively, the strangers could tell the AI-derived advice was different. They rated it as less informative, less trustworthy, less helpful, and were less willing to act on it.
Here's the summary of the study about summaries. What the AI took away was the sorting and deciding what matters. The human judgement. AI does all the judging without you, leaving a fairly generic view that anyone with a few bits of prompting could get to.
What this tells us is that while AI can be a great starting point, it shouldn't be where you stop. Spending time with books and resources is what helps you learn. While AI can give us the TLDR amazingly quickly, never mistake a chat with AI for a deep understanding of material that can only come from spending your time and attention on the material itself.
One thing before the practice: this newsletter is a summary. It ends with something to do rather than something to know, because doing it is where the synthesis actually happens.
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The practice.
So for this week, find the bits a summary would drop.
How to do that:
Pick one thing this week. An article, blog or a chapter of a book.
Read the real thing first.
Highlight three things that landed for you. The example that happened to match your life, the sentence that moved you, or the idea that you don't quite agree with.
Then ask AI for a summary of the same thing and count how many of your three survived.
Usually none. Sometimes one. A summary is good at keeping what matters. It's bad at keeping what matters to you, because it doesn't know you.
Quick links.
That's all for this week again. Hit reply and tell me what article, book or resource you're going to test AI's judgement versus your own.
Tommy