justin․searls․co

Using AI to dig up the lede that AI buried

A frustration I have with how articles are written in this era is that the lede is necessarily buried in order to keep time-on-page stats high enough for the content to perform as chum in the advertising market.

So I thought it'd be interesting to use the Copilot sidebar to summarize articles for me, rather than me waste my time scrolling down four paragraphs to figure out whatever the headline is teasing. A more general purpose prompt could probably get me the answer I really want when I see headlines like this: "is there actually any news here or is this just content for content's sake?"

Can't wait for the natural endgame:

  1. Publishers use AI to write articles designed to perform well as advertising inventory
  2. Advertisers use AI to place the best ads alongside that content
  3. Readers use AI to bypass all of the above and extract the small morsel of valuable information the article contains, if any

Great job, everyone.


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