In the wild · how news now opens
AI summaries on news sites
30-second gist~30s read
Many news sites now put a three-bullet AI summary at the top of every article. Useful for triage. Easy to mistake for the article. Almost always missing the bit that made the journalist write the piece.
Read the summary to decide whether to read the article. Don't read the summary instead of the article.
If you want more
What summaries miss
An AI summariser is built to extract the most likely "main point" of an article. It's reliable for events ("X happened at Y"). It's terrible at:
- Tone — sarcasm, irony, scepticism collapse into neutral statement.
- Caveats — "experts disagree" or "preliminary data" gets dropped.
- The interesting detail — the strange anecdote in paragraph nine that's actually why the piece is good.
If you're scanning the news to stay informed, the summary is a fine start. If you're forming an opinion, it's not enough.