My most-used Gen AI trick is the summarization of web pages and documents. Combined with semantic search, summarization means I waste very little time searching for the words and ideas I need when I need them. Summarization has become so important that I now use it as I write to ensure that my key points show up in ML summaries. Unfortunately, it’s a double-edged sword: will reliance on deep learning lead to an embarrassing, expensive, or career-ending mistake because the summary missed something, or worse because the summary hallucinated?
Fortunately, many years as a technology professional have taught me the value of risk management, and that is the topic of this article: identifying the risks of summarization and the (actually pretty easy) methods of mitigating the risks.