How to summarize a PDF with AI and verify the summary

Check the points you'll act on, not every sentence. Numbers, dates, deadlines, names, amounts, and words like “must”, “may”, “not” and “unless” are where summaries go wrong most often, because a small change reverses the meaning.

Open each cited page and find the passage. If a point has no citation, or the cited page doesn't support it, don't rely on it. Read the omissions list: a brief summary leaves out detail by design, and that list tells you which sections you still need to read.

Finally, ask a direct question about anything important, such as “Is there an automatic renewal clause?”. A chat answer with its own citation is a second, independent check.

Text inside images, charts and diagrams isn't read, so a conclusion shown only in a chart won't appear. Scanned pages without OCR are invisible to the AI. Definitions matter: a summary may say “the Term is two years” without noticing that “Term” is defined elsewhere to include renewals. And references to other documents, such as a master agreement, can't be resolved unless you upload those too.

Be specific about your goal. “Summarize for a tenant deciding whether to sign” produces a more useful result than “summarize”. For a long report, summarize once briefly to find the important sections, then ask questions about those sections. For legal, medical or financial documents, use the summary to prepare questions for a professional, not to replace their advice.

To write the summary, the document's text is sent to OpenAI's API, which by default does not use API inputs to train models. Don't upload documents you aren't allowed to share with a third-party processor, such as documents covered by a confidentiality agreement that forbids it.