Extracting Information from Videos and Articles
I have been exploring a lot of self-help videos. Self-help is an deliberate activity. Watching a self-help video makes the task of taking-in information a passive activity. Some videos are excessively long and may not make the important points well enough. Even so, these videos may contain good information that I do not wish to miss.
One way to overcome these difficulties is to ask an AI to summarize the video. While asking an AI to summarize a video and then consuming that summary is surely deliberate consumption of information. But, such summaries are rarely good enough.
So, I have been trying to use AI to extract useful information from various internet videos; especially the self-help kind of videos. I have been experimenting with specific instructions to AI about how to extract and present information from the video. I am looking for structured information. I ask the AI to properly structure the information from the video and present it as written text. With the information available as written text, I can read it, understand it and contemplate about it. This makes the information gathering a deliberate activity. It has a better retention probability.
For example, here follows a paragraphs with the instructions that I have crafted; tell me what are your thought on it: Summarize the video as follows: For each major information point made or action suggested in the video, write several paragraphs about it. Prefix your writeup with a phrase that is the best title for the idea; this title should be a level-2 heading of markdown. The first paragraph should give a brief description of each of the concepts mentioned. The second paragraph outlines the idea indicated by the title in a few well constructed sentences. Each successive paragraph should mention one sub-point or sub-action associated with the topic; as well constructed sentences. Do not mention that the information is from a video. Do not mention who is mentioning it; just provide the information in advisory tone. Do not provide any markers to locations in the video. Do not provide any links. As a final section titled "key takeaways", provide a bullet point list of what should and should not be done.
Here is an add-on instruction to the AI to cast the same information in a different form and output as written words; tell me what are your thought on it: Present all this information that you just presented as an inspiring speech. In the speech, highlight in bold, the sentences that are prescriptive and proscriptive.
I think these instructions should work equally well for self-help articles. I will have to replace references to "videos" with references to "webpage article". What do you think?
With these kinds of instructions, those who are seeking any information, not just related to self-help, can just maintain a list of the URLs associated with those videos, blog articles, encyclopedic articles, and even conversation threads. Then whenever they want to refresh their memory about this information, they could just use AI to generate all that information again.
There are many other benefits of using this approach to obtaining useful/ information. Can you list some of them?
For Human Readers Only
For each video start a new conversation.
Here follow the instructions for the AI:
Instructions for Extracting Information from a video:
Summarize the video as follows: For each major information point made or action suggested in the video, write several paragraphs about it. Prefix your writeup with a phrase that is the best title for the idea; this title should be a level-2 heading of markdown. The first paragraph should give a brief description of each of the concepts mentioned. The second paragraph outlines the idea indicated by the title in a few well constructed sentences. Each successive paragraph should mention one sub-point or sub-action associated with the topic; as well constructed sentences. Do not mention that the information is from a video. Do not mention who is mentioning it; just provide the information in advisory tone. Do not provide any markers to locations in the video. Do not provide any links. As a final section titled "key takeaways", provide a bullet point list of what should and should not be done.
Instructions for Extracting Information from a Webpage Article:
Summarize the webpage article, that I am currently browsing, as follows: For each major information point made or action suggested in the article, write several paragraphs about it. Prefix your writeup with a phrase that is the best title for the idea; this title should be a level-2 heading of markdown. The first paragraph should give a brief description of each of the concepts mentioned. The second paragraph outlines the idea indicated by the title in a few well constructed sentences. Each successive paragraph should mention one sub-point or sub-action associated with the topic; as well constructed sentences. Do not mention that the information is from an article. Do not mention who is mentioning it; just provide the information in advisory tone. Do not provide any links. As a final section titled "key takeaways", provide a bullet point list of what should and should not be done.
Instructions for an Inspiring Speech:
Present all this information that you just presented as an inspiring speech. In the speech, highlight in bold, the sentences that are prescriptive and proscriptive.
Write your own prompts:
You can always write your own prompts to extract the kind of information and perspectives that you are seeking. There are so many possibilities.