Summary Judgment
This synopsis was written in 1998 by Rick Polito, a Colorado-based journalist. Always source your quotes.
"AI summaries" are becoming ubiquitous. I've been trying to figure out how to articulate exactly why they are so often a pointless waste of space, if not wholly misleading, setting aside the problem wrongly termed "hallucinations". Even what you might call a correct paraphrase often misses the point.
Whatever the work, whether it's a talk, a tv show, a podcast, a book, an interview, an article &etc., the value resides in specific quotations. Think about how much quoting works to each other is a part of human knowledge transmission and reliving our enjoyment of things. Across centuries, even.
There's a lot of nuance to identifying the bits that really get at the big picture, or capture a common sentiment in a particularly incisive or surprising way. A paradoxical aspect about storytelling is that a highly specific element often has far more universal resonance than a generality.
Life is so much more than a bland digest of events.
Well-written summaries and high-level themes have their place, sure. But frequency is not a proxy for relevance. And as the synopsis at the top shows, words are a choice, so choose well.
