Is the ChatGPT API Refusing to Summarize Academic Papers? Not so fast.

The author, Matt Mazur, discusses his experience with the ChatGPT 3.5 API refusing to summarize certain arXiv papers. He notes that this issue has led to a perceived decrease in the quality of ChatGPT’s responses. However, upon further investigation, he found that the problem was not with the API's ability to summarize papers, but with the specific instructions he provided for summarizing. The issue seemed to arise from the complexity of the guidance or potential copyright concerns. He also noted that the GPT 4 model did not refuse to summarize any papers using the same prompt. The author invites others to experiment with the script and share their findings.

Key takeaways

ChatGPT 3.5 API occasionally refuses to summarize certain arXiv papers, a behavior that was recently noticed.
The refusal to summarize does not seem to be a problem with summarizing papers in general, but rather with the specific guidance provided on how to summarize the paper.
Despite the refusal, GPT 4 has never refused to summarize a paper using the same prompt, and for most papers, ChatGPT 3.5 follows the guidance and summarizes the paper 100% of the time.
The author is unsure whether this refusal to summarize is a new behavior or not, and invites others to experiment with the script and share their findings.

Is the ChatGPT API Refusing to Summarize Academic Papers? Not so fast.

Key takeaways

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