Can Our New AI Overlords Write Chapter Abstracts?

As I’m preparing my book for final submission, I am confronted with the groan-worthy task of having to prepare abstracts not only for the entire book, which is to be expected, but also abstracts for every chapter (presumably for digital circulation).

This is a good bit of work and I started to fool around a bit with various AI summarizers to see whether it would be possible streamline my abstracting of these chapter. So I asked one of the summarizing robots to conjure an abstract for my introduction:

This document discusses the archaeology of the contemporary American experience, exploring how archaeological methods and principles can be applied to understand the present in new ways. The document highlights various case studies, including the Undocumented Migration Project, the archaeology of supermarkets, and the study of contemporary behaviors and formation processes. The concept of contemporaneity allows for multiple overlapping views of the present, and the last 50 years offers a useful, absolute chronology for the present. The document also discusses the relationship between the notion of contemporaneity, methods that archaeology deploys to document our world, and an experience that we might recognize as “American.” The archaeology of the contemporary American experience is a developing field that has the potential to contribute significantly to the archaeology of contemporary race and gender.

It’s… meh. I would have to do a good bit of retroactive editing to make this work, but it was the best abstract that I could muster from any of the standard (and free!) AI summarizing bots available right now.

Another tool produced something that was damn near jibberish:

As the excavator brought to the surface dirty and damaged Atari game cartridges, it was painful to contemplate the relationship between the human costs of the global economy and artifacts of my childhood in this abrupt juxtaposition of my private past and our contemporary present (Wheeler 2014). The value that New Orleans residents put on patina parallels in some way that the value that collectors put on the stench associated with the dirty and broken Atari cartridges excavated from a New Mexico landfill. Transported from the patinated disaster site of post-Katrina Orleans to the boom-time contingency of North Dakota`s Bakken, the reuse of these trailers reflects a quintessentially modern landscape shaped by the flow of people, capital, and fossil fuels. Despite their different contexts, the archaeology of patina in New Orleans and the contemporary Bakken oil boom represent opportunities to interrogate the experiences of both American capitalism and global climate change. The archaeology of undocumented migration in the Sonoran Desert offers a distinctly American window to the tragic experience of transnational migration perpetrated by ponderous persistence of the modern nation-state. Archaeological approaches to the contemporary world not only serve to document ephemerality of the present, but also reveal the hidden and the overlooked alongside the visible, material features that define the contemporary American experience. The archaeology of the contemporary world, however, is a comparatively young field, especially in an American context, and because it…

The shortcomings of these tool got me thinking a bit about both limited some of this technology remains for even one of the most basic (and universally loathed) tasks in academic writing: abstract preparation.

It also got me thinking about how how readable my text would be to our new AI overlords and whether its resistance to simple summary is a feature or a bug.