Using AI to make summaries
Why might you summarise with AI?
A summary is a concise version of a longer text or document. In terms of your learning, summaries are useful for quickly understanding the content of scholarly readings such as books, research papers or other sources, such as video lectures. You might use summaries to quickly grasp the main ideas of a text or evaluate a work’s significance or usefulness without going through the entire original piece. Artificial intelligence (AI) tools can assist you in creating summaries for your studies.
Summaries enable you to integrate information from your class readings, video lectures, and/or relevant external sources into your learning and exam preparation. Understanding how to use summaries effectively is important to enhance the credibility of your work, and maintain academic integrity.
AI can quickly read through a lengthy text and provide an overview of its content. This can be useful for, among other uses, checking your understanding of a text and reinforcing your learning.
Watch the video below for an overview of how you might summarise material using AI. This video was produced in partnership with Monash University students.
Tips for summarising with AI
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What kinds of content can you summarise using AI?
In your studies, you might use AI firstly to create summaries of content and then, secondly, to use these summaries effectively to assist your learning.
You can ask AI to summarise a wide range of content types. Here are some examples:
Written content:
- Academic articles and research papers: AI can condense complex studies into key points, findings and conclusions.
- Blogs, news articles and website content: It can create concise summaries of lengthy articles, website pages or blog posts.
Audio and video content:
- Lectures, tutorials, online courses and educational videos via YouTube or similar platforms: It summarises main learning points, instructional content, and outcomes.
- Podcasts and interviews: it creates brief summaries of key points, discussions, and conclusions of podcast episodes or interviews.
- Conference presentations or webinars: it captures the main topics, insights, and key takeaways.
Reports and Data
- Data summaries: AI can summarise key findings of large reports and datasets.
There are several types of summaries that you might need to consider for different learning purposes. Depending on the purpose, you may choose one type of summary over another.
Descriptive summaries provide you with an overview or description of the main points or structure of the content without going into detailed analysis or interpretation of the source. You can use these summaries when you need to know about the “what” and “how” of the content rather than the “why”.
They are great for the following tasks:
- Topic overviews: These descriptive summaries can assist when you require understanding of broad topics.
- Reading comprehension: You can use descriptive summaries for enhancing your reading comprehension, using it to identify the key points of a text before reading in detail.
- Revision: These summaries can be helpful for final assessments or exam preparation, when you need to recall the main topics and structure of previously studied unit content quickly.
- Preliminary research: You can use these summaries to get an overview of the main themes and scope of various sources for your preliminary research.
Explore the image below to find out more about creating one of these summaries. Examples have been created using Copilot, Monash University’s recommended tool with data protections that has been provided to all Monash students.
Informative summaries provide a more comprehensive overview of the content you are summarising. You can use these summaries when you need core information and findings such as key points, terms, figures, examples or evidence and main arguments.
You can use informative summaries in these study tasks:
- Comprehensive note-taking: These can be used for detailed and organised notes that capture the essence of your readings, making it easier to study and review later.
- Revision: You can use informative summaries to provide comprehensive coverage of the main points and details from readings. This can be helpful for reviewing key concepts and arguments before your exams.
- Comparative analysis: You can use these summaries when comparing multiple texts or sources. The summaries provide a clear outline of each source's main points and arguments, and can be helpful for comparing and contrasting.
- Research projects: Informative summaries of key sources can serve as a foundation for your research projects, helping you to know how the sources relate to your topic or research questions.
These summaries provide you with a deeper level of engagement with the material, which often involves discussing the implications and applications of the information.
Here are some study tasks that analytical summaries can be beneficial for:
- Enhanced comprehension: You can gain a clearer and more thorough understanding of the material through these summaries, by identifying and analysing the underlying themes, arguments, and evidence.
- Critical thinking development: These summaries help you with interpreting the information, and analysing and evaluating the content. You can use these summaries to not just remember facts but also understand the argument of a text.
- Application of concepts: You can use these summaries to understand how to apply concepts in different contexts or across different subjects or topics. This skill is often tested in exams.
How might AI help you summarise?
Because summaries distil complex, and sometimes lengthy information into simpler statements, the actual act of creating summaries can help you learn. Summaries generated by AI can help you clarify, consolidate and confirm your understanding of content.
Clarify
AI summaries assist you if you are struggling to understand something. If you are reading through a text and want to confirm you are comprehending it correctly, consider putting the section into a AI tool to confirm your understanding. You can also get AI to help clarify key terms you don't understand or to rephrase things to help with comprehension. E.g. “Explain it like I am 10”. Remember to use your evaluative judgement to check that the response is correct.
Consolidate
Summaries help you reinforce your learning. Summaries are a great way to wrap up a topic or week in your studies. AI can generate this for you, if you provide it with your notes. Then, check (confirm) your generated summary makes sense to you using the process below.
Confirm
You can compare a AI summary to one you have written. You can also ask two different AI tools to summarise the same content and compare the outputs. This can help you confirm your understanding. Differences between the summaries are to be expected and you should ask yourself why this might be the case. For example, depending on your prompt, you may not have given the AI enough context. You also have a lot of knowledge about your units that the AI does not. Similarly, AI will have things it focuses on due to its programming. Importantly, look into the reason, and examine why you and the generated summary, or summaries, have emphasised different components of the text.
Response and Accuracy
When using AI, it is important to remember that it is not always accurate. AI does not know things, and produces its answers based on algorithms and patterns. Even if you have given it a text to draw from, AI does not interpret the text; rather, it looks for particular words that are placed together, and its responses are based on this. Regardless of why you are summarising, always remember to critically evaluate the response.
Many AI tools, such as Copilot, include caveats and warnings regarding their accuracy in the response they provide. Nevertheless, it is your responsibility to check the accuracy of the output.
Prompting techniques
How your prompt is structured impacts the quality of the response. The more detailed you are, the better. Consider what part of the text you want AI to focus on, how you want your response structured, and if you are looking for it do something specific (e.g. “ask me follow up questions”).
When summarising, there are multiple ways to input your content, whether that is a document (text file or PDF), a weblink, or text excerpts (for example, notes) in AI. Alongside your prompt you also need to provide the content. Consider trying the following techniques:
- Add everything - Alongside your prompt, add the entire piece you want summarised. However, when you do this, the program has to ‘read’ through a lot of content. This can reduce how precise the summary is. Also, you may need to consider the maximum length a prompt can be, the file upload limit, or any file type restrictions when using this approach. You may not be able to enter the entire text.
- Divide the text - To increase the potential accuracy of your summaries, you can divide up your content and enter it over numerous prompts. While this may improve the quality of the section summaries, without the whole content the AI will not have all the context. This technique can also be useful when the whole text, or file size, is too large to be entered into one prompt. In both cases, read the summary critically to ensure the response is reflective of the ideas in the whole text.
- Chat with the AI – Many AI programs also have chat features. If you feel your summary could be enhanced, provide follow up prompts to improve the quality.
Remember, if you are not happy without the response, consider reviewing and refining your prompt to improve the response.
Look at the examples below to see how you might prompt AI to create summaries.
Considerations when summarising with AI
NoteIf you are using generative artificial intelligence in your assessments, make certain that it is permitted for use, and allowed to be used in the way that you are using it. You will also need to acknowledge its use. |