Wisconsin Flooding Crisis After Extreme Weather Spurs Damage

This blog post explains why an AI assistant may respond that it cannot access a specific URL and asks you to paste the article text instead.

Drawing on three decades of experience in scientific communication and AI-assisted workflows, I outline the technical and practical reasons for that limitation and provide clear, actionable guidance on how to share content for summarization, analysis, or rewriting.

Table of Contents

Why AI assistants can’t open arbitrary web pages

There are several technical and policy reasons an AI will ask you to paste content rather than follow a link.

From a system-design perspective, many AI deployments run in controlled environments without web-browsing capabilities to protect privacy, reduce security risks, and ensure consistent behavior.

Users should understand this is intentional: it preserves data confidentiality and avoids the unpredictability of fetching dynamic or paywalled content.

It also keeps the assistant’s outputs reproducible, since the model only uses the text you provide as input.

Common constraints and safeguards

Connectivity limits, content licensing, and privacy are the top reasons for this constraint.

In practice, these constraints mean the assistant depends on user-supplied text to perform tasks such as summarization, extraction, translation, or rewriting.

How to prepare the content you paste

To get the best results quickly, structure your input so the assistant can act on it without follow-up clarification.

Clear, well-formatted pasted text reduces ambiguity and speeds up the task.

Here are practical suggestions to ensure efficient, accurate outcomes:

Paste the full article text if you want a complete summary—don’t rely on snippets unless you only need specific parts summarized.

Include headings and paragraph breaks so the assistant can identify structure and main points.

Note the desired output (e.g., “summarize into 10 clear sentences”) right after the pasted text.

Avoid sensitive data — remove passwords, personal identifiers, or any confidential medical or financial details before sharing.

Example prompts that work well

Providing a concise instruction after the pasted text helps the assistant produce exactly what you need.

For example: “Please summarize the pasted article into 10 clear, concise sentences including the main findings and any numerical results.”

This tells the model both the format and the scope.

Tips for long documents and multimedia

Large reports or pages with images require a little extra effort.

If the document exceeds the model’s input limits, break it into sections and request chunked summaries that can be combined into a final synthesis.

For images, captions, or tables, paste the textual description or transcribe key values.

If you need extraction of data points, label them clearly so the assistant can produce structured output (for example: “Extract all dates and numeric values”).

Working with sensitive or proprietary material

When handling proprietary or sensitive content, consider whether anonymization or summarizing at a high level would suffice.

If sharing is necessary, follow your organization’s policies on data handling and retention.

These policies often dictate what can be pasted into external tools.

Here is the source article for this story: Wisconsin Extreme Weather Flooding