By Christine Lee
Copyright brisbanetimes
And while AI summaries may help students keep up with their assigned readings, they’re often unreliable. What the AI decides is “important” rarely aligns with what teachers expect students to take away. In the process, students risk losing out on building critical reading skills.
Dr Thomas Corbin, a research fellow at Deakin University’s Centre for Research in Assessment and Digital Learning, found in a recent survey of students that 54.5 per cent were using generative AI to summarise course readings. “And I’d say its [use] is almost certainly increasing.”
What do book summary apps offer?
Nanwani’s go-to app is Shortform, a subscription-based service that condenses mostly nonfiction books into a single page summary. For more popular books, they also offer chapter-by-chapter breakdowns.
Other apps like Blinkist, Headway and Bookey make a similar pitch, promising increased productivity by condensing a book into just 10 or 15 minutes. But outsourcing the hard work of summarising or analysing texts isn’t exactly new. Students have been doing it for decades, by using online study-guide staples like SparkNotes and LitCharts. And in the pre-digital world, there was CliffsNotes – the first of which was published in 1958.
