AI’s Big Gift to Society Is … Pithy Summaries?
Successful leaders have known all along the danger of such shortcuts. That’s why Jeff Bezos, when he was CEO of Amazon, banned PowerPoint from his meetings. He famously demanded that his underlings produce a meticulous memo that came to be known as a “6-pager.” Writing the 6-pager forced managers to think hard about what they were proposing, with every word critical to executing, or dooming, their pitch. The first part of a Bezos meeting is conducted in silence as everyone turns all 6 pages of the document. No summarizing allowed!
To be fair, I can entertain a counterargument to my discomfort with summaries. With no effort whatsoever, an LLM does read every page. So if you want to go beyond the summary, and you give it the proper prompts, an LLM can quickly locate the most obscure facts. Maybe one day these models will be sufficiently skilled to actually identify and surface those gems, customized to what you’re looking for. If that happens, though, we’d be even more reliant on them, and our own abilities might atrophy.
Long-term, summary mania might lead to an erosion of writing itself. If you know that no one will be reading the actual text of your emails, your documents, or your reports, why bother to take the time to dig up details that make compelling reading, or craft the prose to show your wit? You may as well outsource your writing to AI, which doesn’t mind at all if you ask it to churn out 100-page reports. No one will complain, because they’ll be using their own AI to condense the report to a bunch of bullet points. If all that happens, the collective work product of a civilization will have the quality of a third-generation Xerox.
As for Robert Caro, he’s years past his deadline on the fifth volume of his epic LBJ saga. If LLMs had been around when he began telling the president’s story almost 50 years ago—and he had actually used them and not turned so many pages—the whole cycle probably would have been long completed. But not nearly as great.
Time Travel
Earlier this year I had a conversation with Sam Liang, the CEO of Otter. Once specializing in straight transcription, the company now offers a range of meeting-based AI tools, including of course summarization—but also edgier features, like AI avatars that can attend your meetings and run the discussion. In my Plain View essay on the subject, I wondered whether this could defeat the purpose of meetings.
I ask Liang whether the prominence of AI in meetings might make humans less likely to attend. Knowing that there will be a summary available seems a disincentive to actually showing up. Liang himself says that he attends only a fraction of the meetings he’s invited to. “As CEO of a startup, I get tons of invitations to go to meetings—oftentimes I’m double booked or triple booked,” he says. “With Otter, I can look at my invitations and rank them. I classify them based on the content, the urgency, importance, and whether my presence adds any value or not.” Since he’s the CEO, he may find it easier to opt out. On the other hand, the boss’s presence in a meeting makes it more valuable to those who want clues to his thinking or an instant yes on a proposal.
