I have a goal to read one book a month. On my weekends, I cozy up on the couch with my coffee, and my phone in another room. The point of this ritual is to create space in my schedule that's unbound by time and to-dos -- but as my reading list grows, I find myself trying to get through more pages and more books.
I wanted to see if I could use artificial intelligence to summarize the main concepts, lessons and wisdom of a book I knew I wouldn't get to for months, or even years. Keep the beautiful prose for the physical page, but use AI to summarize non-fiction business books, for example. I picked Deep Work by Cal Newport to test run on ChatGPT .
After using various AI tools, I thought ChatGPT, one of the best-known text prompt chat tools, would do the job best. I also have the $20 a month paid membership, so I wanted to make the most of it. Ponder on the parameters If I've learned anything about AI , it's that the preprompt thinking is just as important as the first prompt.
I didn't just want a huge summary of the book. I wanted to learn Newport's big ideas, arguments, strategies and frameworks regarding deep work, so I could apply it in my work. So, I started the chat with some expectation-setting.
Prompt 1: "Do you have access to Cal Newport's book, Deep Work?" I learned that ChatGPT doesn't have access to full manuscripts -- due to avoiding plagiarism and respecting intellectual property rights -- and would just summarize from the existing information about it online. Not .