How to use ChatGPT to summarize a book, article, or research paper

If you’re confronted with a long document or a lot of complicated text, here’s how ChatGPT can help summarize the key points.

AI chatbots like ChatGPT can be used to make summarizing long articles, research papers, and books an easier task. If you’re supposed to write a summary for school or work on a body of written text, remember that ChatGPT should be used to help you understand a topic rather than to write your work for you.

If you’re a student writing a research paper, someone wanting to know more about a lengthy article, or someone who wants to know more about a complicated subject, you can use ChatGPT to simplify the process.

How ChatGPT can create summaries for you

Materials needed: You will need a device that can connect to the internet, an OpenAI account, as well as a URL to an article, research paper, or the title of a book. The process should take about one to three minutes.

1. Find your article, paper, or book to summarize
If you need ChatGPT to help summarize an article or research paper, find it online and keep it open in a separate tab.

2. Open your web browser and log into OpenAI
Open your web browser of choice and type in chat.openai.com/chat.

Log in or sign up for an account.

3. Type your request
In the chat box, type in TLDR: followed by the link to your article or research paper. TLDR stands for too long, didn’t read.

After you type in the prompt, paste the copied URL of your article or research paper, and ChatGPT knows you’re requesting the chatbot to give you a summary. Then, press the send button, and the chatbot will provide you with a summary.
Or — sometimes, it won’t.

Using ChatGPT to summarize an article via URL is a hit or miss. Sometimes, the chatbot will provide you with a seemingly accurate and short summary of an article. But other times, it will hallucinate or give you an error message saying it cannot access the internet.

It’s recommended that you read the article or research paper in its entirety before asking ChatGPT to summarize it, that way you can decide if the chatbot’s response is accurate. The more reliable but more tedious way to get an more accurate summary is by copying and pasting the text of the article or research paper into the prompt.

4. Summarize a book

To summarize a book, type into the prompt: summarize [book title]. Be sure the book was published before 2021.

It’s not recommended to use ChatGPT to summarize a book you haven’t read to make sure you’re not regurgitating false information into a book report or to a person wanting to know about the book. But if it’s been a few years since you’ve read the book and you want a refresh, using ChatGPT to summarize it can be useful.