What if we summarize all the information in the world into a few hundred volumes of human knowledge, then summarize those into a 10,000 pages book, then that into a 10 long form essays, then those into a 100,000 chars blog post, then that into a pamphlet and finally we summarize one more time into a single tweet.
It would say something like, "This text attempts to summarize the entirety of human knowledge".
Still, IMO summarizing videos is useful. Even if the summary is not accurate or a 1:1 representation of the content, you can mostly get the gist of what is being said without being baited into watching advertisements.
Although, this site doesn't seem to do a great job at summaries. Kagi's universal summarizer has much better results, https://kagi.com/summarizer/index.html . However, it requires transcripts to be available for videos.
I think a lot of people are sort of missing the benefit of something like this.
How do you read a book effectively? You skim the table of contents. You skim the contents of each chapter and mark interesting paragraphs. Then you go through the book another 1-2 times, each time getting deeper into the text and cross-referencing information between different parts of the book.
What tools like this will do is allow us to apply this same workflow to videos, which can greatly enhance our understanding of videos we're interested in and help us contextualise it with the rest of our knowledge.
I've already been doing this and it's helped me expand my knowledge and understanding in ways that wouldn't have been possible without an unreasonable investment of time and effort.
Tried asking Claude to do that, ended up with something pretty beautiful:
Everything is made of atoms & energy, life evolves, math describes reality, knowledge builds on itself, humans need each other & Earth to survive – test ideas, learn from mistakes, be kind, stay curious.
This reminds me of the famous Library of Babel story, where the entire corpus of a language is imagined to live in a library. Like, every permutation of the characters of an alphabet for pages of a certain number of characters in books of a certain number of pages.
The reducto ab asurdum of this library is an alphabet of 0 and 1, a page size of 2 characters and a page count per book of 2.
I know you’re making a joke, but more seriously I think most yt videos have atrocious signal/noise ratios so information compression is likely very useful. Less so for many academic papers (although they have some pretty awful filler sometimes).
I was on YouTube a few weeks ago and saw a 20 minute video with a title that looked interesting. Under it was an AI summary that saved me 20 minutes, and had me skip the video completely. I wish that was under every video.
This week I got a notification about the AI added to YouTube to allow users to ask questions about a video. I haven’t had a chance to use it yet, but I can see that also being useful to get the main points from a long video. Up until now, I mainly use the popularity indicator on the progress bar. Since I watch most videos on my TV, it’s harder to use the AI, as I would need to pull out my phone, open the same video, and ask… that’s a bad workflow.
I do find it a little ridiculous that we need AI to summarize long videos full of fluff, when the only reason they are full of that fluff in the first place is YouTube’s own monetization policies which pushed the average video from 2-4 minutes to 10 minutes.
This is exactly the problem. There are so many 20 minute videos that should have been 2 minutes.
In a way, it's much easier to make the 20 minute video. Just hit record, rant an rave, stop recording and publish.
There are indeed justified long videos stuffed full with knowledge, insight and witty comments to make it fun.
Then there are "slow" videos but magical. Paul Sellers has a 30 min video on how to make mortise and tenons joint with hand tools. Just you and him in real time. You get a (recorded) private lesson from a master craftsman. It's magic. Every minute of it is knowledge transfer.
Some people inflate their video durations intentionally, but I think the majority of people truly think they're using the time wisely. Have you ever tried making a quick travel vlog of a vacation and ended up with a 15 minute short film? That B-roll at the airport was definitely critical to include!
I think the reality is that there are a lot of amateur video creators. Elevating the few talented creators through social engagement metrics isn't perfect, but I think it works well enough. Or at least more so than what these anodyne summarizations would give us.
