Six months ago there seemed to be a flood of people who wanted to normalize Dyslexia and were pitching startups that the 75% of people who can read just didn't need because... they can read.
Haven't seen so many pitches for summarizers lately.
I haven't read the story yet, but found it ironic that when I went to the site, a story about reading was locked behind a paywall that managed to leave the audio version of the story available to listen to instead.
This article, and the New Yorker in general, seem like a good reason why people aren't reading.
If you want to KNOW "What's Happening to Reading?" - you're better off taking this article, and summarizing it in Gemini or ChatGPT or whatever.
If, instead, you want to READ ABOUT "What's Happening to Reading?" - something thoughtfully put together that paints an elaborate picture and is written for the audience who enjoys this kid of thing (getting smaller by the day) - this is for you.
Most people are too busy - whether because they're actually busy or artificially busy with social media and other things that aren't actually good for them - to have time for leisure reading.
One widely discussed study, for instance, judges students on their ability to parse the muddy and semantically tortuous opening of “Bleak House”; this is a little like assessing swimmers on their ability to cross fifty yards of molasses.
WTF. Asking university English students to read a book is not asking swimmers to go through molasses.
Reading text is a recent phenomenon and the brain doesn't have hardware acceleration. I'm not surprised that less and less people read long form text. Becoming an intermediate reader is exhausting when you didn’t grow up with books. After 500 hours, I can only navigate titles like The Selfish Gene with middling comprehension. Black text on white background feels flat and dopamine free, yet the grind itself becomes the reward, and social media’s quick hits lose their appeal.
Well, when I was a kid in the 80s in communist Romania, life was a lot similar to 19th century than what someone in Western countries was experiencing. No TV (obviously no computers), so most significant form of entertainment came from reading primarily. I never read "classics" or the books that were on school's compulsory list but I did read anything I could get my hands on and looked entertaining. I recall seeing the movie https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065207/ first time, some time after the fall of communism and invasion of cable TV and thinking, "I know this story!" because I read the book like 5 times, without knowing there's a movie too.
Anyhow, short answer to: "What's Happening to Reading?": it's being replaced by video content as primary source of entertainment. Main drive behind mass reading was amusement, not practicality. Now that amusement no longer requires (much) reading, the general level of literacy of the public is not exceeding that.
> "LLMs can make difficult books accessible to more readers (like Cliff's Notes or Blinkist), BUT some books shouldn't be summarized because the difficulty is part of the importance."
> "An A.I. companion throughout life could be a powerful tool for reflection and memory, BUT my human wife and I (who are capable of love) fill this role for each other."
The author's a reader and writer, and I was initially grateful to see there wasn't pearl-clutching around the impending impact of Large Language Models on literacy. But then I felt like it should have been more of a call to action, either to reject or embrace AI. I wonder if this it the "acceptance" stage of grief for AI skeptics like myself.
Freuqntly after reading books like "Ray Dalio Principles" and "The hard thing about Hard things" and "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck", they are so long that I forget the point of the book and just never put it into my own words so I forget everything unless its been repeated throughout the book 6 times. there's no knowledge check at the end of most books. So like the article says I just subscribe to blinkist now and save the effort.
I think it's fine to pick up a story in whichever modality you find most engaging, and in the long term AI tools will supercharge this.
New modalities of presentation will make media more accessible to a wider audience, so they can benefit and learn from it, even if some of the magic is lost in translation. Consider how many more people got to experience Lord of the Rings thanks to the Peter Jackson movies, who otherwise would've never picked up the books.
To a certain extent, translations which play with the presentation and complexity of the text have already been around for hundreds of years. Just compare all the translations of the Bible.
Some modernized retellings of classic stories are quite delightful, like Stephen Fry's series of classic Greek mythology.
Personally, I can't wait to generate an anime based on Penrose's The Road To Reality.
This was a pretty thoughtful piece and a pleasure to read. My gut reaction at first was that it was going to be some critque on children not reading due to generative ai (a cynial piece), but it was quite an interesting reflection on simply how reading is changing from the prepective of this author whose spent a his life deeply reading books
The ending had a nice flair of grandness to it as well.
Once upon a time, reading and books were for the elites. The printing press and the Enlightenment changed that and, time passed, we got other forms of entertainment that required less and less mental investment. Now anybody can choose to inflict themself with either literacy or vote-for-Trump mental acumen. Maybe touching the inner mind of high-flying human thinkers will become a thing for the elites again, with the silver lining that access to books will be slightly less about how golden is one’s cradle.
Summarizers start with the default assumption that reading is an obstacle standing between the reader and some kind of reward. Even the idea that knowledge is something that is capable of being transferred is something that has to be assumed at one’s peril.
On the other it's those of us who’ve read in the old school style, for fun, in private that are more convinced of the opposite than anyone. If anything getting summaries might be the worse of both worlds because one might be left with the false impression of understanding where there is none.
Anyways, as was pointed out elsewhere in the thread, even English majors and other serious literary people often have no idea what they’re talking about, which just goes to show that people who were going to read will do it regardless of what else is happening in their life, and people who weren’t going to read will not read even if it’s their major. In this sense, LLMs don’t really change anything. The same person operating the tool will continue to be the same person in either case.
> If anything getting summaries might be the worse of both worlds because one might be left with the false impression of understanding where there is none.
It's bad for the individual, but even worse for the collective. The AI summary reader isn't just convinced they understand, they also share that incorrect understanding in discussion. They effectively inject LLM slop into real life conversations and forget the subjectivity of reading.
This leads to what I consider more harmful. Discussions where the particiants themselves don't even believe in the stuff they are arguing. Where human beings, devoid of their own subjectivity, sling summaries and empty "facts" at each other. As if what 1984 textually said is important in any way beyond how you and I, the humans, connected with it.
I found very quickly when I started associating with philosophy majors, reading the material usually does not correlate to understanding it, and many people simply don't want to put in the effort to understand something that isn't clear at first glance.
I do think your point that some people wouldn't read regardless is bad. People will waste time doing things that are available to them. If less forms of entertainment are available, picking up a book becomes more commonplace.
I often wonder how much humanity's rate of progress will slow (or regress) in the coming decades.
I don't begrudge them their ability to make a living, but it is a bit ironic that I can't read an article about reading without a subscription or archival service. I get that isn't really the point of the article, but I do think that news/magazines inability to find a way to successfully move beyond the heavily subsidized advertising-supported model (and so the current clunky experience in general) cannot help inspire more people to read. Not claiming it actively reduces readers as a whole, just that it's one less avenue for increasing the desire to do so.
From the article: "About midway through my graduate program, I had to sit for a general exam—an hours-long cross-examination conducted by three professors. The exam was based on a reading list, distributed a year in advance, that spanned nearly the whole of English literature, from Beowulf to “Beloved,” and included items like “Joyce, Ulysses,” and “Yeats, Poems.” I read day and night; to persevere without eyestrain, I had to buy a special lamp, and a magnifying glass on a stand."
And get off my lawn.
Actually, young people are writing more. Before the Internet, many people out of school never again wrote a full paragraph. Now they write a few every day.
50 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 65.1 ms ] threadHaven't seen so many pitches for summarizers lately.
If you want to KNOW "What's Happening to Reading?" - you're better off taking this article, and summarizing it in Gemini or ChatGPT or whatever.
If, instead, you want to READ ABOUT "What's Happening to Reading?" - something thoughtfully put together that paints an elaborate picture and is written for the audience who enjoys this kid of thing (getting smaller by the day) - this is for you.
Most people are too busy - whether because they're actually busy or artificially busy with social media and other things that aren't actually good for them - to have time for leisure reading.
Anyhow, short answer to: "What's Happening to Reading?": it's being replaced by video content as primary source of entertainment. Main drive behind mass reading was amusement, not practicality. Now that amusement no longer requires (much) reading, the general level of literacy of the public is not exceeding that.
To paraphrase some ideas poorly:
> "LLMs can make difficult books accessible to more readers (like Cliff's Notes or Blinkist), BUT some books shouldn't be summarized because the difficulty is part of the importance."
> "An A.I. companion throughout life could be a powerful tool for reflection and memory, BUT my human wife and I (who are capable of love) fill this role for each other."
The author's a reader and writer, and I was initially grateful to see there wasn't pearl-clutching around the impending impact of Large Language Models on literacy. But then I felt like it should have been more of a call to action, either to reject or embrace AI. I wonder if this it the "acceptance" stage of grief for AI skeptics like myself.
Haha. Liars. Less than one percent, tops.
New modalities of presentation will make media more accessible to a wider audience, so they can benefit and learn from it, even if some of the magic is lost in translation. Consider how many more people got to experience Lord of the Rings thanks to the Peter Jackson movies, who otherwise would've never picked up the books.
To a certain extent, translations which play with the presentation and complexity of the text have already been around for hundreds of years. Just compare all the translations of the Bible.
Some modernized retellings of classic stories are quite delightful, like Stephen Fry's series of classic Greek mythology.
Personally, I can't wait to generate an anime based on Penrose's The Road To Reality.
The ending had a nice flair of grandness to it as well.
On the other it's those of us who’ve read in the old school style, for fun, in private that are more convinced of the opposite than anyone. If anything getting summaries might be the worse of both worlds because one might be left with the false impression of understanding where there is none.
Anyways, as was pointed out elsewhere in the thread, even English majors and other serious literary people often have no idea what they’re talking about, which just goes to show that people who were going to read will do it regardless of what else is happening in their life, and people who weren’t going to read will not read even if it’s their major. In this sense, LLMs don’t really change anything. The same person operating the tool will continue to be the same person in either case.
It's bad for the individual, but even worse for the collective. The AI summary reader isn't just convinced they understand, they also share that incorrect understanding in discussion. They effectively inject LLM slop into real life conversations and forget the subjectivity of reading.
This leads to what I consider more harmful. Discussions where the particiants themselves don't even believe in the stuff they are arguing. Where human beings, devoid of their own subjectivity, sling summaries and empty "facts" at each other. As if what 1984 textually said is important in any way beyond how you and I, the humans, connected with it.
I do think your point that some people wouldn't read regardless is bad. People will waste time doing things that are available to them. If less forms of entertainment are available, picking up a book becomes more commonplace. I often wonder how much humanity's rate of progress will slow (or regress) in the coming decades.
Result: No text will be read by anyone except AI
And get off my lawn.
Actually, young people are writing more. Before the Internet, many people out of school never again wrote a full paragraph. Now they write a few every day.