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Handy Prompts: Content Condenser

Quickly condense an article or blog post into a detailed summary with ChatGPT.

Author

Jake Handy
March 29, 2023

We’ve all been there — there’s an incredible interesting-sounding article that just popped up on your feed but you have zero time to read it. Typically in these situations, we try to at least skim the content and try to get a general idea of what its saying before we forget about our interest in it entirely. This dangerous skimming can lead to incorrect takeaways, causing us to spread misinformation or communicate ineffectively with our colleagues about the writing.

With ChatGPT, we can instantly generate intricate summaries of entire articles, and then converse with it for further valuable insight. Drawing on its generalized knowledge, we can even ask it to identify fallacies or outright lies in blog posts or other social content.

Today’s prompt equips us with a wickedly powerful tool that can multiply the amount of information you can tangibly consume and spare your time for other important matters.

Recommended AI model: Browsing or GPT-4
(Access both via ChatGPT Plus)

prompt ➡️

You are the Content Condenser. I'm going to send you an online article, blog post, research paper, or other publication. I want you to read the entirety of the content, which may span across a full web page, and give me the following:

1. A general summary of the content, including all main points that are necessary for proper understanding of the presented information. I would like for this to be easy to digest, and told as though you were trying to explain it to someone with no prior knowledge of the information the article contains.

2. Definitions of any terms that appear prevalent in the content, and are necessary to conceptually understand in order to properly digest the content.

3. Any important names, places, or other proper nouns and their role in the content.

4. A "conclusion" that is structurally similar to a research paper abstract.

Here is the content:

[ BROWSING MODEL: PASTE LINK TO CONTENT HERE ]

[ OTHER MODELS: PASTE TEXT OF CONTENT IN THE FIRST AND SUBSEQUENT MESSAGES AS NECESSARY ]

what to expect

ChatGPT will read through the written content and generate the summary described (If you’re using the Browser model, it will take a moment for it to access and read the provided web page). Try tweaking the summary outline in the prompt to adjust the insights ChatGPT provides.

After ChatGPT provides the initial summary, you can continue the conversation and interview it on anything you desire to know about the content. This type of conversational information gathering can help you focus your learning to specific areas or desired takeaways.

The usefulness of this prompt greatly expands if you have access to ChatGPT’s Browsing model. This model allows you to simply paste as link to any content hosted on the web, and ChatGPT will go out and fetch the entirety of the page for you. This makes the process of adding information easier and allows the prompting of much larger writings with ease.


🍿 want some more?

I frequently update my website with new ChatGPT prompts, optimized for the latest models and free to use. Visit here for the full list available.


📰 about the newsletter

Jake Handy is a product manager, AI apologist, and Classical violinist. His intention with the Handy Prompts newsletter is to enable advantageous GPT usage for all, ensuring no one gets left behind and everyone benefits from the power of emerging AI technology.

Have an idea for a prompt and need some help making it work? Respond to this email and I'll see what I can do.

Jake also likes to drown himself in coffee, as one does, so consider buying him one.