I Stopped Using AI to Summarize My Reading
A summary saved me time and cost me the part where I formed my own opinion. I went back to marginalia.
I'd paste articles into a model and read the summary instead of the piece. It saved an hour a day and slowly flattened my thinking, because the summary is someone else's reduction, and I'd adopted it as my own without the friction of actually reading.
The cost showed up in conversation. I could repeat the gist but I couldn't argue with it, because I'd never met the details. A summary I didn't write gives me a position I didn't earn, and that's a shakier thing than it looks.
I switched to reading the first and last third myself and only using the model to find the part I'd skipped. The model became a map, not a substitute, and I kept the judgment that comes from the actual sentences.
If you summarize everything, you're not reading more, you're remembering less of what you read. Keep the model for the lookup, not the consumption, and the opinion stays yours.