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I asked ChatGPT to summarize 14501 books in 5 bullet points. Here's the result
- cranberryturkey 3y agoHow do you get ChatGPT to read the book?
- bookpecker 3y agoGPT-4 turbo has a context window of 128k tokens, so you can divide every book into a few chunks for initial summarization, then merge the results for the final summary!
- cranberryturkey 3y agoWow. Sounds like it’ll get expensive quick with all the api calls. I hope you make your money back via Amazon.
- cranberryturkey 3y agoI assume you have pdfs. How do you split them up?
- bookpecker 3y agopdftotext is a Linux utility to extract text from PDF files. Then you can easily cut the text file into pieces. For best summarization, it's best that the pieces overlap a bit, so that important paragraphs that lie on the boundaries are not lost.
- lancebeet 3y agoI'm assuming you don't need to. ChatGPT can just create the bullet points from summaries of the books consumed as part of its training data.
- pramsey 3y agoFor any book popular enough to have be put into GPT training data, you can get a summary without uploading it. The idea that these big, corporate models (their "intellectual property" if you will) have been trained on data they downloaded from ebook pirating sites... it's a real head shaker. https://aicopyright.substack.com/p/has-your-book-been-used-to-train https://aicopyright.substack.com/p/has-your-book-been-used-t...
- crispyambulance 3y agoIf these were scrappy start-ups looking to survive one can sort-of understand why they might bend the rules about copyright to train their models. But we're talking about behemoth companies here, one of which deigns to make a pitch worth 7 Trillion dollars (10% of global GDP). So... they're trying to rake in investment at levels that are unheard of in human history. Surpassing Apollo, the Manhattan project, the great pyramids of Egypt, the Great Wall of China, and anything else one might think of. And they're not paying for the books ???
- rfarley04 3y agoI definitely thought you meant that you asked it to write 5 bullet points that covered/summarized 14,501 books haha. Would love to see the output from that prompt.
- nomad_dude 3y agoIt would be hilarious if one of the bullets were “42”.
- readthenotes1 3y agoMaybe that book was left out?
- acrophiliac 3y agoMe too! I was really looking forward to seeing a summary of so many books. Was expecting to see something like: * life is hard * people can be evil * war is inevitable * everyone is afraid of dying * humans persevere even in the face of insurmountable odds
- rfarley04 3y agoThere's a quote from Naval Ravikant that I really like (but now can't find), "All self-help books essentially boil down to 'prioritize long-term payoffs over short-term ones'". Haven't seen a single instance of that being incorrect.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoYeah, but this pairs well with that joke about being lost in a hot air balloon. The one about the answer being detailed, technically correct, and utterly useless. I mean, if homo sapiens could reliably prioritize long-term payoffs over short-term ones, the world would look very different.
- glenstein 3y agoI did ask it to summarize all of war and peace in a single sentence, then a single word. I forget the sentence, but for the word, it chose Humanity.
- hsavit1 3y agoI see that the first book reviewed is "Rich dad poor dad" by Robert Kiyosaki. He's a known grifter that has been wrong on nearly everything over the last 15 years. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38877126 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38877126
- ionwake 3y agoI read his book and took notes but I cant recall anything of value I learnt from it. Just wanted to share my thought.
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- xenonite 3y agoIn my opinion, he shares knowledge mainly suited for the kids of the rich dad.
- unmole 3y agoI agree with your characterization of Robert Kiyosaki as a grifter. But that link is just clickbait.
- ionwake 3y agoThis is fantastic, now can you do it again with 20 bullet points? If so I would pay for that! Thanks
- bookpecker 3y agoThat's definitely doable!
- jjjjj55555 3y agoIt looks like a lot of these are self-help or other fluffy books. It's funny because whenever I read these books I feel like someone just took a bunch of bullet points and then added anecdotes and fluff to make it fill a book. Herd you're reversing the process.
- TrailMixRaisin 3y agoThis is my feeling two. Many times the author tries to say the same thing 20 different times to fill a book. Many ot those books could have been a great 30 minute presentation.
- runjake 3y ago> Many times the author tries to say the same thing 20 different times to fill a book. Many of those books could have been a great 30 minute presentation. This is indeed how many, many of these books started -- as a $x minute presentation or an article. I always try to find the source presentation or article and consume that before reading a book. It has served me well. You get the core ideas, concisely, without the fluff.
- jbm 3y agoFrom the other extreme, I had recently asked GPT to do something similar with the text of Botchan (a famous literary work in Japan). The bullet points it gave were were somewhat accurate at points, although I would say that the timeline and relationships wrong at some points. His childhood caretaker became a "woman he had a relationship with" later on, which was a complete mischaracterization. I think the regular version, sans the book text, might be more accurate (as it is probably based on Wikipedia / etc..)
- nunez 3y agoIf you're into savage debunking of junk self-help books, check out Michael Hobbs and Peter Shamshiri's podcast _If Books Could Kill_. Their obliteration of _Rich Dad, Poor Dad_ (the first book highlighted on this site) is one of their best episodes.
- makach 3y agoIt's a lesson in putting things into personal perspective. When you stop to look there are always someone worse off than you and likewise better off. Be happy with the little coincidences that makes up life.
- lordswork 3y agoNow do Gemini 1.5, which can actually fit the entire book into the context length.
- scotty79 3y agoYeah. I'd prefer to see that instead.
- genman 3y agoOk, I'm getting it now. AI spam is really becoming a problem. I think the page should be much more upfront about the content being AI generated summaries.
- loa_in_ 3y agoYeah, HN readers know it's AI generated, others do not because it doesn't say so anywhere on the page
- pipnonsense 3y agoI made a bot Xwitter account to AI-summarize book reviews (scraped from GoodReads) https://twitter.com/BookReviewAi https://twitter.com/BookReviewAi I find the results very interesting. Like this "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" one. https://twitter.com/BookReviewAi/status/1758162004529885573 https://twitter.com/BookReviewAi/status/1758162004529885573
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- jbverschoor 3y agoA per-chapter summary would be great. The sentences could be longer if that helps. Great little tool!
- 3abiton 3y agoGPT-blinkist
- steffanA 3y agoSo you bought and fed 14,500 books into the AI to make these summaries?
- xu3u32 3y agoI imagine they just asked ChatGPT to give him a bulleted summary of X book.
- AdamH12113 3y agoIs it actually summarizing the books, or is it regurgitating things other people have said about the books in its training data?
- TeMPOraL 3y agoSince no one is born with innate understanding of what "summarize a book" means, the same question can be raised about people.
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- glimshe 3y agoThis is a great idea! I'd love to see 3 levels of summary: 1) 5-bullet summary, 2) 5-paragraph summary and 3) 5-page summary so I can keep digging deeper if I'm interested. Not sure if any of this goes against copyright law, though... EDIT: I wonder what would be the outcome of summarize all 1500 books together in 5 bullet points (like a single summary for all books)
- tzs 3y agoThose are numbered points, not bullet points. Did you actually ask for bullet points and ChatGPT gave you numbered points instead? Or did you just ask for 5 point summaries and it chose to use numbered points? For the books I checked where I felt I could reasonably guess what topics would be covered and in what order, the 5 points seemed to cover things in the same order I expect the book covered them. If that is the case numbered points would be more appropriate than bullet points, so if it was ChatGPT that decided on numbers vs. bullets it looks like it made the right call.
- emaciatedslug 3y agoOP, getting likely false positive on Bitdefender Mobile as a risky behavior when I click on a book. https://ibb.co/bBrnBZG https://ibb.co/bBrnBZG
- number6 3y agoTrailing whitespace (common on mobile) breaks the search
- wendyshu 3y agoHow do you fit an entire book in a ChatGPT prompt?
- stuckkeys 3y agoOpenAI API
- stuckkeys 3y agoHow much did that cost?
- TMWNN 3y ago>I took a course in speed reading, learning to read straight down the middle of the page, and I was able to go through War and Peace in 20 minutes. It's about Russia. —Woody Allen
- readthenotes1 3y agoOf course you also had ChatGPT create the website? And did you ask it first what subject would be interesting to HN readers?