ChatGPT Can Summarize Articles! (3 Prompts For Great Output)

By just writing one line of text, you can get an article summarized.

Summarize this article: [paste article]

Let’s summarize this article “Should students be allowed to use AI?” by putting this prompt into ChatGPT.

It’s even easier if you have ChatGPT Plus in GPT-4 mode, where you can just point it to a web page using this prompt:

Summarize this article: [paste URL]

And here’s the result:

But hold up. 

The output isn’t very good. It tells me little and serves a limited purpose only.

You could get much, much better output if you thought about the purpose of the summary and wrote a more precise prompt. Let me explain.

Summarizing Article For Specific Purposes

Let’s ask ourselves why we want to summarize articles. Here are some reasons that I can think of:

1. Save time, while grasping the main ideas
2. You want to shorten it for a specific purpose like meta-descriptions, excerpts or abstracts;
3. You want to create a PowerPoint/Google Slides presentation.

For each of these purposes, you will need a more specific prompt to perfect your summary. Let’s examine them one by one.

How Many Words Can ChatGPT Summarize?

Depends. ChatGPT’s context window (i.e. ChatGPT’s memory) is limited based on which GPT version you use.

If you are using ChatGPT, and you have paid for the GPT-4 version, your maximum word count can be between 2K to 6K words. The free GPT 3.5 can do 1-3K words.

Save Time While Grasping Main Ideas

The initial prompt provides a summary that has one problem – it doesn’t tell you much. It lists out the pros and cons, but doesn’t elaborate. 

For example, it said, “Critics, however, worry it may replace essential learning practices, diminish critical thinking, resemble plagiarism, raise privacy concerns and reduce human interaction.”

How does it reduce critical thinking? How does it resemble plagiarism? 

Here’s how you can summarize the article’s points and include a short elaboration on the points.

Summarize the Article. I want the output to fulfill these points:
1. Summarize it in bullet points. 
2. After each bullet point, use a sub-bullet point to give a one-sentence elaboration.

Article:
[paste article]

The output looks so much more presentable and readable, just by adding the guidelines.

Summarizing Article For Specific Purposes

Sometimes, you will also need to summarize an article for specific purposes. 

For example, if you were writing a Twitter post, you would need to keep your character count to 280.

If you were writing a meta-description for SEO, you would need to keep it to a maximum of around 150 characters.

You might also need to write an abstract for a paper where you have a word count limit.

In all cases, ChatGPT can help you summarize an article for all these purposes.

Here’s a prompt that you can use:

Summarize the Article. I want the output to fulfill these points:

1. I am summarizing this article for [what platform?]. [Insert platform] posts have a limit of [insert character/word count limit]. 
2. Write a [platform] post that's [tone e.g. “exciting”, “informative and professional”]. The output must summarize the article and keep the character count below [character/word count limit].
Article:
[paste article]

As an example, I used the following guidelines for Twitter:

1. I am summarizing this article for Twitter. Twitter posts have a limit of 280 characters. 
2. Write a Twitter post that's exciting. The output must summarize the article and keep the character count below 280 characters.

If you don’t like the first output, you can click the regenerate button (the counterclockwise arrow) to get another one.

You can also ask ChatGPT to output multiple examples by giving it a new guideline. Add it to your guidelines after number 2.

3. Output 3 examples

In the case of generating a meta description, I used this prompt:

Summarize the Article. I want the output to fulfill these points:

1. I am summarizing this article for a SEO meta description. Meta descriptions have a limit of 150 characters. 
2. Write a meta description that is informative. The output must summarize the article and keep the character count below 150 characters.

And I got this output:

Finally, if I wanted to write an abstract for a paper, I can use this prompt:

Summarize the Article. I want the output to fulfill these points:

1. I am summarizing this article for a research paper's abstract. Research paper abstracts have a limit of 200 words. 
2. Write an abstract that is informative. The output must summarize the article and keep the word count below 200.

And the output:

Summarizing Article For A Presentation

Let’s say you wrote an article, and you wanted to create a presentation. You want ChatGPT to summarize your article into points so you can copy and paste them into your slides. 

This task is a bit more complex because it has two steps:

1. Get ChatGPT to craft an outline, which you can modify or approve by saying “PROCEED”.
2. After approval, get ChatGPT to output the bullet points that you can copy and paste onto your slides

The reason why we do not go directly to stage two is because ChatGPT might have problems determining what is important on each page. By guiding ChatGPT in the outline, you will be able to get it to focus on the points that you want.

Here’s a prompt:

I am creating a presentation from the Article below. I want you to create the slides for me with the following points:

1. The presentation has [how many slides do you need?]
2. There are two steps to this task. You must first output an outline to fit all the slides in the presentation. Once you have written the outline, ask me if I want any modifications. If not, ask me to say, "PROCEED", whereby you will start the outputting of the bullet points that should go on each slide. The bullet points should not be an explanation of what I should talk about, rather they should be the exact text that will go on the slides.

Article: [paste article]

And you get this:

You can tell ChatGPT what changes you’d like to make or else you can say “PROCEED” and it will start generating the slide’s bullet points.

ChatGPT missed out the fifth reason against AI use in school, so I instructed ChatGPT to add it in, while deleting the first slide, which I felt added no value to the presentation.

Then, I said “PROCEED” and got this output (which I truncated; full conversation log here):

And there you have it. Copy and paste these into your slides and you’re done!