I used AI to generate personal book summaries [Weekend WRAP 77]

Apologies for the delay this morning Reader, I spent a little extra time on this newsletter — let's get to it!

AI has been a big topic in my work and (online) social circles. Personally, I’m not afraid of being replaced by AI. If anything, I think it will become another helpful tool for personal knowledge, research assistance, and content generation.

The example I’m going to share today is my favorite direct application of AI — using Kindle highlights as the raw material for book summaries.

Note: this is a little different than my normal WRAP — but I was getting pretty excited and wanted to share it with you. If you have feedback, click reply or use this form.

💡 Big Idea: Using ChatGPT to generate personal book summaries

I've always been a big reader, often reading multiple books at a time and going from one book to the next immediately. Even though I highlight AND know the value of revisiting those highlights... I'm so excited to move to the next book that I don't summarize or review what I have read.

Enter ChatGPT and Readwise. I've told you about Readwise before, it's a tool that syncs my Kindle highlights to Notion and Roam Research. A page is automagically created in Notion, effectively creating my reading library. But what to do with these highlights?

See, I can ask ChatGPT to summarize any book, but that's a generic recap of reviews scraped from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc. It's not meaningful to me, and I don't need a basic summary — I read the book already.

The ChatGPT + Notion + Readwise recipe

Here's what I did: I copied all my favorite highlights in the book's Notion page (which synced with Readwise) and pasted them into ChatGPT. But that's not all. These highlights are relevant to me—making the summary more personal than normal—but they are only direct highlights from the book. Less personal.

This is where the prompt comes in: I can frame the summary around my perspective. Instead of only asking ChatGPT to summarize the book, I can ask it to write from "my perspective." Here's the prompt I use:

ChatGPT Book Summary Prompt

• The following text is a series of highlights from the book Title by Author. Please write a book summary from these notes and highlights.
  • The following text is a series of highlights from the book “Rest” by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang. Please write a book summary from these notes and highlights.
• Write from my perspective related to the book.
  • Write from the perspective of a person who has bought in to hustle culture, is experiencing burnout, loves the sound of rest but struggles to actually do the thing.
• What follows are the notes and highlights.

The key element is the perspective frame in the second sentence. With that sentence, I'm infusing the review with an element of my experience and relationship to the book. Watch the video below for a full walkthrough.

This is a work in progress, an experiment with ever-changing variables. But it's been very interesting to use a tool like ChatGPT as a research assistant, first draft specialist, or tone switcher. In my opinion, there's still no comparison between the end result of AI vs Human generated final drafts. But the usefulness of AI tools is rapidly increasing.

📹 Video to Watch: ChatGPT Book Summaries

Here’s my walkthrough of everything above. Please note that I placed “comments” on the timeline and sidebar to act as chapter markers for the video (it’s hosted on Loom). Feel free to make your own comments and reactions to different parts. I appreciate your feedback!

🧵 Article I Read: AI Homework​

One of my favorite newsletters is Stratechery by Ben Thompson. In this article, Ben talks about using ChatGPT to help research his daughter's school paper. Not only was it helpful, but there's a real case to be made that AI writes better papers than many students (but we will leave that for another day).

The problem Ben and his daughter found though are legitimate errors in the response. Confident, well-written, academic... and incorrect. The point is while these tools can be very helpful, the data (in my case, highlights) needs to be well structured, accurate, and contextual to the user.

​Read AI Homework on the Stratechery website (free article).

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Thanks for reading this weekend edition of the WRAP, see you next week!

Matt Ragland

p.s. if you have a (literal) minute to share feedback, click here.

p.p.s. many of the links I shared are affiliates, which means I earn a small commission at no additional cost to you.