On AI Summarization…

I’ve found one very practical use for AI on my personal website. I have a LOT of content out there, and I haven’t written summaries for it all.

When showing this content in lists, I usually just extract about 300 characters to use as a summary, but that’s not perfect. So I bounced a bunch of content off Azure’s summarization API, and I was pretty happy with the results.

I decided to incorporate multiple summaries, and just show whatever I have for each content item. I’ll always have an extract, obviously; I might have written a description; and I’m slowly gathering AI summaries for the rest.

And I may come up with some other type of “summary” in the future – it’s got me wondering about the different ways we can describe and summarize content for our users.

I’m careful to note where and when I got the AI summary. I might use different services in the future, so I keep track of where each summary comes from, since that output is the historical record of a specific request to a specific AI.