[usefulcat]

I think "context" is being used in different ways here.

> "It’s nearly impossible to grasp how much context this gives them to play with"

Here, I think the author means something more like "all the material used to train the LLM".

> "A true summary, the kind a human makes, requires outside context and reference points."

In this case I think that "context" means something more like actual comprehension.

The author's point is that an LLM could only write something like the referenced summary by shortening other summaries present in its training set.

[jjaksic]

But "shortening other summaries from its training set" is not all an LLM is capable off. It can easily shorten/summarize a text it had never seen before, in a way that makes sense. Sure, it won't always summarize it the same way a human would, but if you do a double blind test where you ask people whether a summary was written by AI, a vast majority wouldn't be able to tell the difference (again this is with a completely novel text).