Stop Copy-Pasting Articles into ChatGPT. There's a Better Way.
Summary (TL;DR)
Copy-pasting articles into ChatGPT for a summary runs to seven steps, leaves no record, and loses the source. Readplace does it in one click. You save the article, an AI summary arrives on its own, and both stay in a searchable archive. Summaries are cached by URL, so they tend to be ready right away.
You find a 2,400-word article that looks worth reading, except not right now, and what you really want is the gist before you commit any more of your afternoon to it. So you fall into the routine you have run a hundred times.
- Select all.
- Copy.
- Open ChatGPT.
- Paste.
- Type "TL;DR".
- Read the summary.
- Close both tabs.
- Forget the article existed.
That is seven steps across two apps, and at the end you keep no record of what you read. I do this too, and I noticed it only after pasting the same article into a fresh chat twice in one week.
The friction in the routine
It's manual every time. No shortcut makes this smooth, because the work is you acting as a clipboard, carrying text between two browser tabs by hand. The 100th time costs you the same effort as the first.
The summary vanishes. ChatGPT threads get buried within a day or two, so the summary you read on Tuesday is hard to find again by Friday, and you give up and re-paste the article rather than dig for it.
There's no archive. You walked away with the summary and left the article behind. You didn't bookmark it. It's somewhere in your browser history, which is to say it's gone.
Long articles get cut off. Paste a 5,000-word piece and you can run into the model's token limit, so you split the article into chunks, paste it twice, and hope the context carries across the break. Reading turned into project management.
You lose the queue. Reading is rarely one article at a time. It's fifteen tabs opened on Monday with a vague plan to clear them by Sunday, and copy-paste gives you nothing to manage that backlog with.
The same scene, one click
Here is that afternoon again, this time with Readplace:
- Click the browser extension.
That's the whole sequence.
The article gets saved and a TL;DR summary shows up on its own, without a prompt or a second tab.
The real gain is that the article stays, summary and source together, instead of evaporating with the chat thread.
You read the summary, decide whether the full piece earns your time, and either way the article is sitting in your archive, searchable and yours. The tab-switching, the pasting, the wording of the prompt, and the chat thread you'd lose by Friday all drop out of the routine.
Readplace caches summaries by URL. When a popular article has already been saved by other readers, it gets summarised once and your copy is ready the moment you open it.
What the two routines leave behind
Speed is the part you feel first. The other part is whether a month of reading adds up to anything you can go back to.
With copy-paste, each article is disposable by design. You pull out a summary, discard the source, and end up with no trail back to the piece, no library to browse, and no way to revisit what caught your attention last month.
With Readplace, a saved article becomes part of an archive you own. The summary is there for a quick scan, the full text is there when you want the depth, and the reading list behaves like a queue you can work through instead of a wall of tabs one crash away from disappearing.
If this is you
ChatGPT is a good tool, and using it as a hand-fed article summariser is a habit I fell into too, one paste at a time, until the steps added up. There's no shame in it. The routine works, which is exactly why you stopped questioning it.
Readplace folds those steps into one click and keeps the article instead of throwing it away.
Save the piece, read the summary, and have both when you come back for them.