Using AI to summarize long content sounds good until you actually try it

I went down a rabbit hole trying to use AI to summarize long podcast episodes.

On paper it sounds perfect. Just take the transcript, drop it into a model, and get the key points.

In reality it’s a bit different.

You have to find a clean transcript first, which isn’t always straightforward.

Then you paste thousands of words, try different prompts, tweak the output, run it again.

And every time you do it, you’re using your own tokens.

It works, but it starts to feel like a lot of effort for something that should be simple, especially if you’re doing this regularly.

I also noticed that a lot of summaries either stay too generic or try to include everything, which makes them less useful than expected.

At some point it just made me question whether this is actually the best way to use AI for these kinds of tasks.