And you'd confirm that by having to read the unsummarized content. Thus useless.
Consider that the alternative to reading the summary often isn't reading the entire text yourself. It's reading nothing.
Reading an inaccurate summary is actually less useful than reading nothing. It's not like the utility of the summary is to exercise a reading muscle.
> Reading an inaccurate summary is actually less useful than reading nothing. It's not like the utility of the summary is to exercise a reading muscle.
No it's not. You're acting like these tools generately wildly inaccurate text. Even when they're wrong, they're mostly accurate. Almost everything people read is a mostly accurate summary, whether it's from some guy's article or wikipedia. We rarely go to the primary source.
edit - as a concrete example, I did my taxes this year with help from ChatGPT. It was a big improvement over using Google or reading through the instructions myself. And if it was wrong, well, maybe I'll get a bill or a check in the mail, but that was always a possibility and making a mistake on your taxes isn't illegal.
It is when it amounts to tax evasion.
If this is your approach to your taxes then you are probably wasting your time by using either of Google or ChatGPT. Just punch some numbers in to TurboTax based on a quick skim of the buttons, say “good enough for government work,” and wait for a check or a bill in the mail baby.
Just because you can amortize the cost of ChatGPT over more operations doesn't mean you aren't paying for it. You said you didn't want to pay someone for software to do your taxes, not that you wanted to pay only a little.
Asking it to do a summary on a paper or meeting notes I’m mot familiar with, yes the utility is very limited exactly the way you’ve pointed out.
However, asking it to summarise or shorten a paper or meeting notes I’ve been directly involved in - that has enormous utility for me.
It provides me a quick starting point to create summaries, and I get to see if the salient points are addressed, and if not, I get to add them in.
I’m no a fast writer, and often experience writers block, so having a fast way to start is enourmously useful to me.