Summarizing Complex Online Sources with GenAI - Part 1
The Written Word Media Indie Authors Survey 2024
Generative AI is changing so rapidly that trying to keep up can seem overwhelming. Ironically, AI can help sort wheat from chaff.
This week’s post will be another short one due to health issues, so I apologize for that. It can’t be helped.
But we can start to explore some of the truly amazing capabilities available to us in the Generative AI space. The good news is that many tools are free or have a free subscription model, which is handy for exploring the myriad available approaches.
Continuing with my exploration of the ethical use of AI in the creative writing arena, I was listening to the latest podcast from the Indie Writers Club, episode 010, to be specific. Where the hosts, Cara and James, presented the key points of the recently released Written Word Media Indie Authors Survey 2024.
Experimenting with NotebookLM
It’s still in the early days, and I find navigating the interface unintuitive. For example, I still haven’t figured out how to see my prompt history in a saved Notebook. There must be a way, surely?
Apart from these irritating issues, starting a new notebook and adding the links to the podcast and their survey results webpage was super simple. In one of my prompts, I asked for a table-formatted summary of the points covered in the survey without verifying the table contents. They looked thorough and concise.
Fortunately, I copied the result to a document, see below; when I returned to the Notebook a few days later, the formatting seemed lost, although the table data was there. Annoying
The Old Favorite - ChatGPT
I had intended to write a deep dive on the Written Word Media Indie Authors Survey 2024. But as I said, nature and illness had other ideas. I linked the same survey results webpage to ChatGPT and asked it to analyze the results and give me potential talking points to research further and write about.
After expanding the suggestions in GPT, I now have a 3000-word document full of useful information and insights. The correlations between the different aspects of the survey are eye-opening. I can’t wait to get stuck into it all.
But, unfortunately, this will have to wait for another day. It’s all I can do to write these few words without a coughing fit.
Final Thoughts
Why this section? I always have one, even for a post as short as this one. We live in incredibly exciting and interesting times as long as we take these tools seriously.
The worst thing you can do as a creative is to stick your head in the sand and hope it all goes away. It won’t.