Summary
AI has changed the economics of reading long documents. What once took hours can take minutes — but only with the right workflow. The wrong workflow — 'summarize this PDF' — produces confident-sounding lies. The right workflow uses AI as a targeted reader, not a replacement.
Objectives
- 01State the right and wrong workflows for reading long documents.
- 02Design an AI-assisted reading workflow for a specific document type.
- 03Identify when the document should be read without AI.
The Lesson
The right workflow
Ask specific questions with page references expected. Ask for direct quotations, not summaries. Verify each quotation against the original. For key sections, read the original directly and use AI only for related sections. Never trust an unverified summary of anything that matters.
Key Ideas
- Specific questions beat 'summarize.'
- Quotations beat summaries; quotations must be verified.