When AI Reads for You

Offloading the burden of reading

In all of the various discussions of AI generation, it had no more occurred to me that people would utilize AI to read for them anymore than it had occurred to me that people would utilize it to listen to music for them.

Need to read a novel for class? These days, you might get by with skimming through an AI-generated summary of the plot and key themes. This kind of possibility, which undermines people’s motivation to read on their own, prompted me to write a book about the pros and cons of letting AI do the reading for you.

Palming off the work of summarizing or analyzing texts is hardly new. CliffsNotes dates back to the late 1950s. Centuries earlier, the Royal Society of London began producing summaries of the scientific papers that appeared in its voluminous “Philosophical Transactions.” By the mid-20th century, abstracts had become ubiquitous in scholarly articles. Potential readers could now peruse the abstract before deciding whether to tackle the piece in its entirety.

The internet opened up an array of additional reading shortcuts. For instance, Blinkist is an app-based, subscription service that condenses mostly nonfiction books into roughly 15-minute summaries – called “Blinks” – that are available in both audio and text.

But generative AI elevates such workarounds to new heights. AI-driven apps like BooksAI provide the kinds of summaries and analyses that used to be crafted by humans. Meanwhile, BookAI.chat invites you to “chat” with books. In neither case do you need to read the books yourself.

If you’re a student asked to compare Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” with J. D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” as coming-of-age novels, CliffsNotes only gets you so far. Sure, you can read summaries of each book, but you still must do the comparison yourself. With general large language models or specialized tools such as Google NotebookLM, AI handles both the “reading” and the comparing, even generating smart questions to pose in class.

If the use of AI is simply used to avoid forced reading, I see no real problem here. No one really tends to learn much from forced reading anyhow, and given the decades-long assault on the traditional literary canon and the substitution of “My Immigrant Experience” and “My Black Experience” and now “My Gay Black Female Immigrant Furry in a Wheelchair Experience” for Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and Flaubert, absolutely nothing is being lost by allowing an AI to regurgitate the necessary rather than actual reading the material.

The ability of the average student, to say nothing of the ability of the average teacher, to meaningfully compare two works of fiction is nonexistent anyhow. While it’s necessary to expose children to quality literature at an early age if they are to become advanced readers - and Castalia House’s Junior Classics are without question the optimal way to do so - it really makes no difference if the average adult who doesn’t enjoy reading goes through a period of forced exposure to books he won’t like and won’t remember or not.

The elite will read. The intellectual elite will read and write. Everyone else will pursue their hedonic pleasures according to their preferences. So has it always been, and so will it always be. If AI permits the latter to reduce the burden of the pretensions of the elite upon themselves, it’s really a net positive for everyone involved.

But it wouldn’t be a hand-wringing article about the purported intellectual dangers of AI if it lacked a few appeals to pseudoscience.

You can find correlations between reading and brain growth in children, happiness, longevity and slowing cognitive decline.

This last issue is particularly relevant as people increasingly let AI do cognitive work on their behalf, a process known as cognitive offloading. Research has emerged showing the extent to which people are engaging in cognitive offloading when they use AI. The evidence reveals that the more users rely on AI to perform work for them, the less they see themselves as drawing upon their own thinking capacities. A study employing EEG measurements found different brain connectivity patterns when participants enlisted AI to help them write an essay than when writing it on their own.

Of course there are correlations between people who actually utilize their brains on a regular basis and those who don’t. But most people are idiots who actively hate utilizing their brains, so there is no reason to concern ourselves with the decline of what is already under-utilized cognition.

As for the citation of this emerging research, it must always be remembered that modern science is literally less reliable than a coin toss. The corruption of science and the massive growth of the profitable fake science industry has reached such an extent that it would be deeply foolish to even consider taking these so-called studies into account as a meaningful aspect of the discourse.

Using AI to read for you is a tremendous help when constructing a well-researched argument. Using it to read for you to avoid having to slog through a tedious book someone else is forcing you to read is also a good thing. But using it to read for you for pleasure is unlikely to ever be a problem, since the whole point of pleasure is to personally experience it.