For this assignment, I uploaded a pdf of Benson Jame’s article to Chat GPT with the prompt “summarize.” GPT generated this:
The article argues that Victorian medical texts often linked menopause and female reproductive changes to hysteria and mental instability, reinforcing the idea that women’s bodies were naturally unstable. (article) It examines how doctors such as Robert Barnes and Henry Maudsley described menopause as a “bodily crisis” that could cause psychological disorders, while also contributing to the belief that older women became socially redundant.
(article)
The author compares these medical views with Rhoda Broughton’s short story “Mrs. Smith of Longmains,” showing how the story satirizes and challenges these ideas by portraying a middle-aged woman whose supposed hysteria and irrational behavior ultimately save another woman’s life.
(article) The article concludes that Broughton’s fiction critiques the medicalization of women’s behavior and offers a counter-narrative that highlights women’s agency, intuition, and resistance to stereotypes about aging and madness. (article)
The “(article)s” are formatted like citations in GPT’s response, but they are just links to download the same article I sent to be summarized (lol). I think that it did a decent job summarizing the main idea of the essay, but it is definitely a very short summary compared to the length and detail of the reading. I think that my brief prompt likely influenced the AI to make the summary brief, and it is seemingly mostly ripped word for word from the abstract of the article. I’m not so sure that it got the argument of the reading correct in the first half, the author is not arguing that “Victorian medical texts often linked menopause and female reproductive changes to hysteria and mental instability, reinforcing the idea that women’s bodies were naturally unstable,” I think it is kind of a given that Victorian medical texts perpetuated ideas of instability surrounding women as relates to hysteria, menopause, puberty etc., the author is not arguing this but her argument is based off of this fact. I think the A.I. wrongly interpreted the first part of the abstract which is providing contextual information to the author’s argument and how male doctors of the Victorian era came to their conclusions. The second paragraph of the summary better captures the argument of the paper, but mistakes it for the “conclusion” deduced from the original argument the A.I. proposed. I could potentially see myself using A.I to summarize articles to see if they are worth reading in depth/if they will contribute to my research, but many academic sources online already come with summaries, or they have an “abstract” section which is the author’s own detailed summary of their work. I generally prefer not to use A.I if I can help it but I can understand how it might help consolidate time and work when creating my own academic journal/paper.
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